Markmaking

Why it is so difficult to feel sympathy for UAW workers

Jonathan Mahler's story in the NYT magazine describes workers at a UAW plant -- a strange world in which less is demanded of a person than at an average job, in return for which the pay and benefits are much higher.  The reader is invited to have sympathy for these privileged few. Excerpts:

By the mid-1990s, though, with the Big Three losing market share and staggering under the weight of their union contracts, it became difficult to find assembly-line work in a plant, particularly if you didn’t have a personal connection to the company. Hiring was governed almost exclusively by nepotism. If an automaker was looking to add workers, it invited existing employees to pass along a referral sheet — essentially a one-page job application — to a friend or relative. Nearly all of the autoworkers under the age of 40 whom I met in Detroit found their jobs through a family member. [What could be more sympathetic than workers who get high-paying jobs by virtue of family connections, after a one -page application...]

[...]

A practicing Christian, Powell was taken aback by what he saw taking place around him. The plant was a world of temptations unto itself, with drugs, alcohol, numbers runners, bookies and even “parking-lot girls” who would come to the plant during lunch breaks to service male workers. “Anything you can find outside the plant, you can find inside the plant,” Powell says. “You either get caught up in it, or stay apart from it.” [I know that every workplace I ever encountered has had "parking lot girls" -- it makes for the epitome of a professional, respectable environment.]

[...]

Powell gradually settled in at Pontiac Assembly and was soon piling on as much overtime as he could. In a good week, he worked four 12-hour days and a 16-hour day. Overtime was especially abundant between the beginning of November and Christmas, when hunting season caused rampant absenteeism at the plant. [If I cared a lot about my job and were concerned about my career, I would definitely be sure to go AWOL every year at hunting season...]

[...]

One 38-year-old former Chrysler employee I met, who accepted a buyout package last fall — $50,000 and a $25,000 car voucher — had burned through all of the cash by May and still hadn’t been on a single job interview. I wondered how much longer he would be able to afford to put gas in the brand-new Aspen S.U.V. he bought with his voucher. [This sounds like an extremely responsible person with excellent judgment who certainly deserves a bailout and public sympathy because he's a "worker"]

[...]

After graduating from a magnet high school in the city, Shirese said, she took out loans to attend Northwood University and soon transferred to Eastern Michigan University. During her sophomore year, she dropped out after souring on the party scene. [...]

After high school, Powell enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit and was planning to major in mass communications and broadcasting, but he dropped out halfway toward his degree. He wasn’t the most focused student. [...]

(Powell’s brother, Aaron, attended Winston-Salem State University on a basketball scholarship, but never graduated and now works at a Pepsi bottling plant in Detroit.) [These really aren't the greatest life decisions to be making...]

Sotomayor and Ricci

Willed cluelessness of elites: racial pandering trumps life-or-death competence

I think a fundamental failure is the application of these concepts to this job as if these men were garbage collectors. This is a command position of a First Responder agency. The books you see piled on my desk are fire science books. These men face life threatening circumstances every time they go out. ... Please look at the examinations. ... You need to know: this is not an aptitude test. This is a high-level command position in a post-9/11 era no less. They are tested for their knowledge of fire, behavior, combustion principles, building collapse, truss roofs, building construction, confined space rescue, dirty bomb response, anthrax, metallurgy, and I opened my district court brief with a plea to the court to not treat these men in this profession as if it were unskilled labor. We don't do this to lawyers or doctors or nurses or captains or even real estate brokers. But somehow they treat firefighters as if it doesn't require any knowledge to do the job. 

Firefighters die every week in this country. ... [There was a case ] a few miles away where a young father and firefighter Eddie Ramos died after a truss roof collapsed in a warehouse fire because the person who commanded the scene decided to send men into an unoccupied house, with no people to save on Thanksgiving Day, with a truss roof known to collapse early in the fire because of the nature of the pins that hold the trusses together would have collapsed. And for 20 minutes he couldn't find any air and he he suffocated to death. And the fire chief had to go tell a 6 year-old that her father wasn't coming home. I'm not being histrionic. That happens all the time, and if you can't pass a competency exam and answer substantive job knowledge questions, I think that the only compelling governmental interest or Title 7 interest I see--

LRB · Daniel Soar: Short Cuts

LRB · Daniel Soar: Short Cuts.

Popular etymology in France declares that arobase [@] is actually a contraction of the phrase ‘à rond bas’, where ‘bas’ stands for ‘bas-de-casse’, a bit of printing terminology that refers to lower-case letters, and that it’s somehow therefore related to the word ‘arabesque’. This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

Adam Kirsch on Classical Chinese Poetry

Disturbances of Peace.

Reading such poems, it is easy to forget that their audience was precisely the well-connected literati who staffed the imperial bureaucracy, and that each of these poets eagerly pursued an official career. Even a poet such as Meng Hao-Jan--who, Hinton writes, "never left his native region to follow a government career," but "cultivated the independence of a simple life in his home mountains"--knows that he is writing for the capital: one of his poems is titled "Sent to Ch'ao, the Palace Reviser," and contrasts the bureaucrat's "rue- scented libraries" with his own "bamboo-leaf gardens." Wang Wei came from a prominent family and rose to a high position in the bureaucracy. For Hinton, however, this is essentially irrelevant to his poetry: "Wang enjoyed a long and successful career in the government ... but it is clear that he found his truest self in mountain solitude." Likewise, Wei Ying-Wu, who "never left government service completely," was still "by nature a recluse." All this is entirely in keeping with Hinton's view of Chinese poets as teachers of Taoist-Buddhist wisdom. 

But there is another way to look at these poets. It is possible to see them as worldly and sophisticated men who--like Horace, or like the Elizabethan court poets--found it creditable to praise rusticity, without intending to practice it unless bad luck and old age compelled them to do so. (If it is a sort of Stoicism that these poets seem to espouse, it is worth remembering that the great Stoics of Rome, Seneca and Cicero, spent their lives in the corridors of power.) As Stephen Owen notes, "Most High T'ang poets either served the state or wished to do so: the disdain for high office expressed by many famous poets was sporadic, and rarely accompanied by the conviction of action when an attractive opportunity for service was offered." This is not a question of hypocrisy or bad faith, but of the complex ways in which ideals and realities shape each other for any individual in any culture. It is telling that one of the standard subjects of Chinese poetry was visiting a remote monastery: they were good places to visit, but would the poet really want to live there? If he did, who would see his poetry?

California Meltdown

California Meltdown: When in doubt, Blame the Voters! | Newgeography.com .

Now, we have a budget crisis, and California voters are unwilling to give Sacramento a pass. Why? 

Maybe they don’t think they are getting value for their increased investment in government. California spent about $2,173 per resident (2000 dollars) in the 1997-1988 budget. The 2007-2008 budget spends about $2,738 (2000 dollars) per resident. That represents a 26 percent increase in real (inflation adjusted) per-capita spending in ten years. 

What have California voters purchased with their 26 percent increase in government spending? Are the roads 26 percent better? Are schools 26 percent better? What is 26 percent better? 

That is Sacramento’s problem. It is very hard to identify what good that this increase in spending has purchased. If it has been a good investment, why haven’t California’s leaders convinced the voters?

J. Bottum: Abortion and Catholic Culture

At the Gates of Notre Dame

The aspiring professionals who attend and staff elite Catholic universities tend to identify with other upwardly mobile young people, focused on career and lifestyle choices. But the vast majority of Catholics, to whom Catholic universities ultimately must answer, seek in Catholic culture the strength with which to confront the urgent concerns of ordinary life. 

One could offer here a number of analogies, of varying accuracy. Take divorce in detective stories, for example. In mystery novel after mystery novel through the 1950s, there existed an accepted trope that a reasonable motive for the murder of, say, a wife was that she was a Catholic and so would never give her philandering husband the divorce he wanted. It didn’t matter that Catholics were, in fact, divorcing at nearly the same rate as everyone else in those years; what mattered was the trope: the cultural identity of Catholics as people who do not divorce. 

Friday abstinence might be another analogy: the cultural identification of Catholics with their fish eating. This was a universally recognized marker, a sign of Catholic culture to Catholic and non-Catholic alike. Regardless of how much theology and liturgy were reformed by Vatican II, the loss of Friday abstinence may have caused more changes in Catholic culture than anything else attempted in the aftermath of the council. Of course, Friday fish eating was never as central to Catholic thought as opposition to abortion is now. Even rejection of divorce was not as central, though it, too, involved defense of the family. 

A better analogy might be the role that veneration of the Blessed Virgin played in Catholic culture through the 1950s. Protestants always felt there was something deeply wrong with Catholicism’s treatment of Mary, but—as many Catholic theologians pointed out—the Protestant complaint never precisely fit official Catholic theology on the point. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Protestants were wrong. They understood, in fact, that the Blessed Virgin occupied a cultural place for Catholics that official Catholic theology did not fully express. 

Indeed, the analogy with the cultural role of abortion gains strength when we remember that the Marian doctrines were not forced down on the Church by intellectuals or the hierarchy. Well into the nineteenth century, Catholic theologians and the Vatican generally resisted the movement. The importance of Mary— her symbols and the strong definition of the Marian doctrines—was pushed from below: given to the hierarchy by the sense of the faithful. 

That much is true of opposition to abortion. In an important essay in the Fall 2005 issue of Human Life Review, the historian George McKenna demonstrated the surprising withdrawal of the bishops from the political fight over abortion in the crucial years from 1979 to 1983—and maybe all the way to 1998, when the American bishops finally issued a pastoral letter that sharply separated the life issues from other concerns. The cultural centrality of opposition to abortion in America was not pushed down from above; it was forced on the reluctant bishops by the sense of the faithful, and that forcing took almost twenty years to accomplish.

Value of Yankee Tickets

Yankee ticket prices:

Reader Gary Cicio, NYC podiatrist, did the research, and asks us to choose one of the two options to see a Mariners-Yankees game this season, and from the very best seats: 

Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000. 

Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.

L.A. Unified pays teachers not to teach - Los Angeles Times

L.A. Unified pays teachers not to teach - Los Angeles Times.

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits. His job is to do nothing.   

Every school day, Kim's shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher's union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school. 

He has never missed a paycheck.

The achievement gap wins one - The Boston Globe

The achievement gap wins one - The Boston Globe.

THE TOP priority for state education officials in 2008 is to close the academic achievement gap between white and minority students. But given a chance to do so last month, the state Board of Education retreated...

The one school that got shot down - the International Charter School of Southeastern Massachusetts - was the largest and boldest. Its rejection raises thorny questions about just how hard the Patrick administration is willing to push to achieve equity in education... 

Acting Commissioner Jeffrey Nellhaus recommended approval of the SABIS proposal, but Board of Education chairman Paul Reville voiced sharp concerns. And the board listened to Reville, rejecting the Brockton SABIS school by a 7-2 vote. But when the board jettisoned SABIS, it also unintentionally abandoned minority families in more than a dozen communities. SABIS is one of the few educational systems in the state where minority students not only perform on par with white students, but outperform them, as well. That accomplishment, combined with the fact that there is little charter school activity in Southeastern Massachusetts, should have balanced out other concerns with the application. 

By high school, minority students in Massachusetts lag their white counterparts by more than 30 percentage points in math and English on the state's high-stakes Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. But that is not the case at the Springfield SABIS school, where 94 percent of black 10th graders and 84 percent of Hispanics scored in the proficient or advanced categories on the English section of the 2007 MCAS. That compares with 77 percent of white students statewide. In math, the school's minority students are catching up nicely to their white counterparts. The board erred when it rejected an opportunity for minority students to traverse the gap that swallows so many...The 1,500-student SABIS school in Springfield has a waiting list of 2,677, the longest of any of the 61 charter schools in the state, according to the state's Charter School Association.

Deval Patrick's Destruction of Massachusetts Education.

With the pillars of reform under attack, Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, wrote in the Globe, “You have to wonder why Massachusetts seems intent on retreating from its own nationally recognized success. The backward slide is already evident.” 

The Commonwealth’s 15-year track record of successful education reform gave Governor Patrick a clear path ahead on education policy. Instead of undoing the reforms of his predecessors, the governor could have built on the state’s success by carrying on the commitment to high standards, fine-tuning a successful accountability system, and maintaining the governance structure that had successfully insulated critical education policy decisions from special-interest pressure. He could extend to others the educational opportunity that transformed his own life by raising from 9 to 20 percent the cap on the amount of money that can be transferred from school districts to charter schools in districts whose MCAS scores are in the bottom 10 percent statewide.   

So far, he has chosen instead to dismantle reform and replace the singular focus on student achievement that was the key to education reform’s success with a wish list that would likely cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion per year. With the new Board of Elementary and Secondary Education stripped of independence, there is no entity left that can operate outside the political arena with the sole mission of improving academic performance. 

Results released in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades and in many urban districts. While 15 years of progress will not be undone overnight, as the Patrick administration’s efforts to dismantle reform continue, such drops are likely to become the rule. It is the price we will pay for Massachusetts policymakers snatching defeat from the jaws of the Commonwealth’s historic education-reform victory.

High standards for teachers - The Boston Globe

High standards for teachers - The Boston Globe.

Controversy flared recently when the Massachusetts Department of Education asked its Educational Personnel Advisory Council to review why many minority teacher candidates fail the state's licensure exams. On the Communication and Literacy Skills test administered during the 2005-06 school year, 77 percent of white teacher candidates passed the Communication section, compared with just 48 percent of Hispanic and 46 percent of African-American test-takers. On the Literacy section, 86 percent of white test takers passed, compared with 62 percent of African-American and 61 percent of Hispanic candidates. 

The figures are even more troubling because, in terms of difficulty, teacher tests tend to be at the high school level. In a 1999 journal article published by The Education Trust, Ruth Mitchell and Patte Barth examined a number of teacher tests, and judged the difficulty to be at the "8th- to 10th- (sometimes 7th-) grade level."

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times

The question is, should it take a full year's worth of dedication to get rid of a manifestly incompetent employee?

Judith Perez, principal of Hancock Park Elementary School in Los Angeles, recalled a situation in which a fellow principal had one more teacher than he needed. Under union rules, the teacher with the least seniority was to be transferred. Instead, the principal pushed out a poorly performing veteran by threatening to make her life miserable with frequent observations of her classes, Perez said. 

The teacher ended up at Perez's school. When Perez called the principal for information, he quickly apologized. "I'm so sorry," she recalled him saying. 

Perez soon found out why, concluding that her new teacher was "a total incompetent. . . . She had no idea how to conduct a lesson in reading or math." 

Perez committed herself to either making this teacher improve or forcing her out. 

"I was a [teachers] union leader," Perez said. "I believe in teachers' rights and protections. . . . But my bottom line is I'm in this profession for children. . . . Basically, I dedicated my year to getting rid of this teacher." 

She kept a detailed diary, conducted a series of formal meetings with the teacher and her union representatives -- all called for under the teachers' contract -- and finally persuaded the woman to quit.

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times

Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task - Los Angeles Times.

The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague in the metal shop, saying the district did not prove that the two were having sex. 

The district fared no better in its case against elementary school special education teacher Gloria Hsi, despite allegations that included poor judgment, failing to report child abuse, yelling at and insulting children, planning lessons inadequately and failing to supervise her class. 

Not a single charge was upheld. The commission found the school's evaluators were unqualified because they did not have special education training. Moreover, it said they went to the class at especially difficult periods and didn't stay long enough. 

Four years after the district began trying to fire Hsi, the case is still tied up in court, although she has been removed from the classroom. Her lawyer declined to comment on her behalf. The district's legal costs so far: $110,000. 

Classroom ineffectiveness is hard to prove, administrators and principals said. "One of the toughest things to document, ironically, is [teachers'] ability to teach," Wallace, the Daniel Webster principal, said. "It's an amorphous thing."

Heirs to Fortuyn? by Bruce Bawer, City Journal Spring 2009

Heirs to Fortuyn? by Bruce Bawer, City Journal Spring 2009.

In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims.

The Atlantic Online | April 2009 Unbound | Do the Palestinians Really Want a State? | Robert D. Kaplan

The Atlantic Online | April 2009 Unbound | Do the Palestinians Really Want a State? | Robert D. Kaplan.

Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups “do not aspire to have a state,” for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power. 

New communication technologies allow people to achieve virtual unity without a state, even as new military technologies give stateless groups a lethal capacity that in former decades could be attained only by states. Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action. A group like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the author notes, could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Why would it want responsibility for providing safety and services to all Lebanese? Why would it want to provide the Israelis with so many tempting targets of reprisal? Statelessness offers a level of “impunity” from retaliation. 

But the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space.

Becoming France

Becoming France-- Gildea's artful irony.

In retrospect, Emperor Louis-Napoleon may well appear reckless, erratic, and not overly bright, but just four months before he fell, Leon Gambetta, the future founder of the Third Republic, could declare that "the Empire is stronger than ever." Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir may now stand as one of the greatest triumphs of French fiction, but at the time of its publication the public and the critics alike considered it a disaster, and in its first year it sold barely 1500 copies. On learning in 1831 that Simon Bolivar had died, Stendhal wrote to a friend: "Do you know from what? From envy at the success of the Rouge." The playwright Sylvain Marichal has a reputation as one of the most radical defenders of Revolutionary republicanism, but in 1801 he could still publish a pamphlet entitled Bill to Prohibit Teaching Women to Read. And who was it that attacked Russian Jewish immigrants in 1890 as "these despicable people [coming] into a country that is not theirs"? None other than the wealthy, assimilated Sephardic Jewish literary critic Bernard Lazare.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan Says First Sunday Mass in New York - NYTimes.com

If by "scientific conventions" you mean the liberal-utilitarian habits of mind of the educated elite, endowed with the force of law through the political process, and called "scientific" in an illegitimate effort to wrap them in the prestige of empirical investigation

He did not refer to it, but there is conflict between Catholic dogma and scientific conventions on several fronts, including the medical definition of brain death, the legal definition of the beginning of human life and the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.

RealClearPolitics - Mainline Protestants' Dead End

RealClearPolitics - Mainline Protestants' Dead End.

And here the press reports missed the one really big, obvious headline: Mainline Protestants are dying out. 

The study's authors summarize: "Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent." Overall Christianity has been holding its own in recent years. But since 2001, the liberal mainline Protestants have lost a third of their adherents. 

"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism -- mainline versus evangelical -- is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States."

'3 Rounds, 3 Dead Bodies'

Of course, Islam, a religion of peace, has nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of piracy and hostage-taking, no more than it did in the days of Adams, Jefferson, and Bainbridge

One pirate radioed the Navy destroyer and demanded to know how far they were from the sanctuary of Somalia's coast. "Very far," came the reply from the Bainbridge. "Thank you," the pirate negotiator responded, according to a U.S. military timeline, his politeness masking menace. "If we cannot [reach the] Somali coast, we will kill the infidel."

In Areas Fueled by Coal, Climate Bill Sends Chill - NYTimes.com

Only in America: Families in the Six- or Seven-Television-Household Bracket Accelerate Climate Change, Whine About Bills, Expect Nothing But Sympathy

The house, built in 1953, has central air-conditioning to ward off the heat and humidity of Mississippi River summers, a double-door refrigerator, a washer and dryer, six televisions, three computers and an iron (“We iron all the time,” Ms. Daniels-Hanner said). The family’s monthly electric bill averages $160 in winter and $250 in summer.

[...]

About 130 miles to the northwest, Wendi Wood, a teacher, and her husband, Lee Wood, a fourth-generation farmer, live near the small town of Clarence with their three teenagers. Their six-bedroom house is four years old, and they, too, have many appliances, including seven televisions. 

Electricity costs them about $280 in winter, $360 in summer. After the fall harvest, they dry grain in a silo; then the bills run $600 a month.

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2002

Dalrymple Considers the French Welfare State.

Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others. 

Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity. 

But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.

Forbes.com - Magazine Article

The Unconscionable Public-Employee-Union Swindle

In public-sector America things just get better and better. The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector's $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%. 

For New York City's 281,000 employees, average compensation has risen 63% since 2000 to $107,000 a year. New Jersey teaching veterans receive $80,000 to $100,000 for ten months' work. In California prison guards can sock away $300,000 a year with overtime pay. 

Four in five public-sector workers have lifetime pensions, versus only one in five in the private sector. The difference shifts huge risks from government to private-sector workers. 

NYC socked away $20,000 per employee last year for pension benefits. Since 2000 its pension funding bill has risen ninefold, from $615 million to $5.6 billion in 2008. That's more than the city spends on transport, health care, parks, libraries, museums and City University of New York combined, says the Citizens Budget Commission. 

These benefits are so sacrosanct, and such a source of union power, that labor bosses have turned them into the third rail for NYC politicians--touching them is suicide. That goes for the benefits not only of existing workers but of future ones as well. 

"We have far less to spend on core services, such as public safety, education, parks and senior centers," Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote in December of the city's pension costs. "That defies common sense, and it's hurting our city."

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - JUI-F minister terms Swat flogging a Jewish plot

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - JUI-F minister terms Swat flogging a Jewish plot.

KARACHI: Federal Minister Senator Azam Khan Swati of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) said on Saturday that the flogging of the 17-year-old girl in Swat was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at destroying peace in Swat and distort the image of those Islamists who sport beards and wear turbans.

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2002

The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2002.

Three youths—Rumanians—were attempting quite openly to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear. 

Eventually, two women in their sixties told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths resumed their “work.” 

A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it all could have ended very differently. 

Several things struck me about the incident: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?

Factoid of the day: health care

And how much of that would be saved by better diet and lifestyle choices?

A handful of chronic ailments, including heart disease, diabetes and hypertension, account for up to 80 percent of health care costs, according to medical experts, and 7 of 10 deaths in the United States.

Education Secretary Duncan Says Stimulus Aid Hinges on New Data - NYTimes.com

WONDERFUL NEWS!!! Arne Duncan brings genuine 'hope and change' to ossified educational establishment

To qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information. 

The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education. 

It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college. 

Such information, Mr. Duncan’s letter said, “will reveal both strengths and underlying challenges.”

Steven Pearlstein - In Hollywood, Reshaping a Business Model That Emerged With the Talkies

Steven Pearlstein - In Hollywood, Reshaping a Business Model That Emerged With the Talkies.

"Certainly if this didn't exist, we couldn't afford to build it today," said Credle as we walked through the studio's back lots and manicured gardens. "The models for this business are being challenged every day in every imaginable way, and nobody knows where it ends up. . . . What you see here is going away, and it's not obvious what is going to replace it." 

The world will always need entertainment, and Southern California is the odds-on favorite to produce it. It has the history, the people, the infrastructure and the creative energy. But as Detroit automakers and New York's financiers have learned, these natural advantages can disappear when an arrogant and insular industry comes to view its dominance as inevitable and its outsized compensation as an entitlement.

Against "What Color Is Your Parachute?"

No Paycheck, New Plans - WSJ.com.

The category killer in the get-a-job bookshelf -- "What Color Is Your Parachute?" -- could stand to be retired. First published 39 years and 10 million copies ago, the book keeps coming out in annual editions. But with its clumsy charts and checklists, its hokey visualization devices and hollow platitudes -- "Job-hunting is not a science; it is an art" -- it feels less like a book than the rummage of a community-college guidance counselor. And dusty rummage at that. You can get a sense of the vintage of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" from the fact that it is illustrated here and there with Ziggy cartoons. You can get a sense of its sloppiness from the fact that, in the 2009 edition of "Parachute," the same Ziggy cartoon runs on page 41 and page 167, without anyone at publisher Ten Speed Press seeming to notice. For that matter, the same Peanuts cartoon appears on page 129 and page 282.

Steven Pearlstein - California's Wipeout Economy

Steven Pearlstein - California's Wipeout Economy.

It is hard to overstate how reliant the Southern California economy has always been on population growth to drive its economic growth -- in oversimplified terms, building houses for the next wave of home builders. In the beginning, the early developers could be pretty confident that if they built it, they would come -- from the Northeast and Midwest, and then from all corners of the globe. But in recent years, this perpetual growth machine has pretty much run out of steam as residents old and new confronted the realities of two-hour commutes, bad air, a shortage of water and a backlash against illegal immigration. 

Moreover, without the steady growth in tax revenue that came with population growth, the Ponzi scheme that passes for public finance in California was suddenly and painfully revealed. Much of the blame lies with public employee unions and a handful of other special-interest groups that have essentially hijacked political control of state and local governments. Now, despite decades of high taxes and rapid growth, state and local governments find that they not only don't have the revenue to provide even basic services, but are saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities and infrastructure needs.

Fenton on Palladio

James Fenton on Palladio - TLS

But still, what grips us about the old photographs when we can see them (there are none at Burlington House) is the glimpse we have of the functioning rural economy in which these crucial structures played their part, caught in the years when it was coming to an end, when the threshing machines were making their first appearance. Perhaps it is a snapshot of an old peasant squatting in the barn of a villa long since destroyed, but it is immediately instructive how much of the height of the barn he needs for his supplies. Perhaps it is just a carriage seen under an arcade, or a row of men harvesting in a field, or a line of scythed grass waiting to be stacked for hay. One is reminded that if many of these farm complexes were enormous, longer than the Piazza San Marco in Venice, they were long because they needed to be long. There was so much produce to handle. 

To sleep, like the nobility, sandwiched between the wine and the grain (the grain in the attic, the wine fermenting on the ground floor) no doubt held its anxieties, for the cheating peasant is a well-established figure in the literature. But it was conventionally held to be bliss itself in comparison with the treasonous pressures of the city. To sleep like the peasantry was to dream of famine – those recurring shortages which brought the peasants into the city, to die outside the Doge’s Palace, or to beg outside the churches, “hunger written on their faces, their eyes like gemless rings”.