Political Cartoon: Job Creators

LOVE this cartoon, and it's rooted in fact: http://m.nber.org//papers/w16606

The link above is to a study from Stanford University in 2011 that focused on the economic impact effective teachers have on lifetime earnings for students, and found that an increase of .25 in overall test scores (a standard deviation) would increase GDP by 44 trillion (yes, trillion). Finland is .58 ahead of the United States, and the study showed that 112 trillion would be added to GDP if we simply raised student achievement to Finland's level. It also found that in order to pay a teacher in alignment with their measurably postive lifetime economic impact on students (400k per 20 student class), we'd have to raise starting salaries to more than $200,000. Think of the property taxes...

"Soft bigotry of low expectations"

Question for all the genetic lottery winners out there, like myself (tall, white, male, upper middle class and above)- do you ever feel cheated out of achievement, like you succeeded because others weren't allowed to try, or were just simply unlucky where you were fortunate?

I always regarded the "soft bigotry of low expectations" to be ridiculous because it ignored the actual circumstances minorities lived in, and how difficult it is to overcome one's environment through hard work alone. But I think it works if you flip it to look at how white privilege insulates millions of us from true competition, and an accurate measure of self-worth.

A Federal Reserve economist determined that 60% of one's income is based on one's parents income- it's a stronger predictor than genetically inherited traits such as height. White families have an average of 99k in wealth, black families have an average of 4k in wealth, according to Peter Edelman in So Rich, So Poor.

How are we supposed to be proud about not being born a poor minority in America?

The answer is we can't. But we can recognize our own privilege, and the history of how it became entrenched and defended in our society. And then we can change it.

Climate Change Science- Show Me The Money

Can someone tell me what the supposed nefarious end game is for climate change scientists? What shadowy interest group/pair of evil brothers is bankrolling 98% of the scientific community to declare fossil fuels a threat to humanity?

We know that climate change denials in both the media and academia are rooted in the monetary rewards doled out by interested parties, namely the oil, gas & coal industries. That these industries funded anti-academic research and sought sympathetic allies in the media establishment isn't a wild conspiracy bandied about in the online forums of people dedicated to saving the environment. It's public record.

So, I ask again, what is the equivalent of this in the climate change community? Are the CEOs of wind turbine companies hiring scientists and lobbyists to muddy the waters on the science of how fossil fuels interact with the environment and humans? Was the solar panel industry donating tens of millions of dollars to climate scientists working at East Anglia University to create data that supports a preconceived notion desperately tied to protecting private profit?

I have a difficult time finding questionable motives behind climate change scientists. In my opinion, the only thing climate scientists seem interested in is securing a healthy environment for future generations living on the only habitable planet for humans discovered in the known universe thus far.

Am I wrong? Am I missing the billion dollar payday somewhere? 

Three Years Old Sarah Palin Jokes? You Betcha!

1- Sarah Palin thinks the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers" was about the Jonas Brothers.

2- The Civil War, according to Sarah Palin, was fought over manners.

3- Sarah Palin told a group of third graders that the Cold War was fought between Tylenol and Advil.

4- Sarah Palin doesn't believe that waterboarding constitutues "torture" because she thinks it's the technical name for surfing.

5- Sarah Palin thinks the Bush Doctrine was a guide for lesbians.

6- Sarah Palin told Glenn Beck that Alexander Hamilton was a "great place to invest your money."

7- Sarah Palin was disappointed when she showed up at the Ritz Hotel and it wasn't made of crackers.

8- Before the VP debates, Steve Schmidt wanted to have Sarah Palin change her shirt because it was "too loud" for TV. She said she couldn't hear it at all.

9- When Sarah Palin hears someone yell, "Duck!!", she pulls out a gun.

10- Sarah Palin thinks Amnesty International is a phone card company.

11- Sarah Palin wouldn't allow her daughter Bristol to open an account with Bank of America because, "it was one of the banks that Obama nationalized."

12- Sarah Palin thinks the Red Cross is a pagan religious symbol.

13- During the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin agreed with an audience member that then candidate Obama was a "terrorist" because, "after all, even he says he's an agent of C.H.A.N.G.E."

14- Sarah Palin doesn't believe that "Real Americans" live on the coasts because, "they harbor our enemies."

15- Sarah Palin is so passionately in favor of the free market because she thinks there's a 100% discount.

16- Sarah Palin on climate change: "How can we address it if we don't know where it lives?"

17- Sarah Palin showed up to an interview with Chris Matthews on his MSNBC show "Hardball" in a Yankees jersey, with a bat and glove.

18- Sarah Palin opposes the "public option" because, "the option only works in college."

19- Sarah Palin feels that the Minority Whip in Congress should have went away with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

20- Sarah Palin thought the Lincoln Memorial was a BCS bowl game.

21- Sarah Palin favors the Democrats using reconciliation for Health Care Reform because she thinks they need to apologize to God for pushing the public option.

RIP Racism: 3000 B.C. - 11/04/2008

In 2010, the Biloxi Public School District in Mississippi voted to shut down Nichols Elementary School, due to "budget concerns." The board, which is overwhelmingly white, cited a 400,000$ loss each year for the district as the reason, despite that fact that it later turned out to have a 10$ million surplus. Even when the Kellogg Foundation stepped in with a 1.5$ million grant, the board said their decision was final. The school was closed.

Nichols was the top performing elementary school in Biloxi that year; it ranked 16th out of 432 public elementary schools in the state; it was the only school in Biloxi to earn the state's GreatSchools designation, and produced the state's 2009 Teacher of the Year. The school has been around since 1886, and the student population was 90% black (surprise!). (Note: you can find this story, and others like it in Chuck Thompson's Better Off Without 'Em)

Racism doesn't ride a horse, with a sheet drapped over its head, and a noose swinging from its hands in the 21st Century. It comes in the form of local school boards citing fictitious budget concerns so they can close the black school that was outperforming the white schools. Abstract things, like Mr. Lee Atwater once counseled the Republican party to focus on. Here's that quote, and make sure to remember it:

" You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

So remember this- when you hear a politician say, "cut, cut, cut", you know what he really means.



Can You Beat Jim Crow?

Political game show idea- Can You Beat Jim Crow? Jeff Foxworthy hosts a show that asks contestants questions from literacy tests given to blacks during the Jim Crow era. Below are the four questions in Part C of one such literacy test in 1960s Alabama. See how many you could have answered, and be honest (I got 1 of 4).

1-If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?

2-At what time of day on January 20th each four years does the term of the President of the United States end?

3-If the President does not wish to sign a bill, how many days is he allowed in which to return it to Congress for reconsideration?

4-If a bill is passed by Congress and the President refuses to sign it and does not send it back to Congress in session within the specified period of time, is the bill defeated, or does it become law?

The Politics of Santa Claus

Every year, progressives make the mistake of claiming Santa Claus as one of their own. This is a mistake, in my opinion. It's difficult to identify what characteristic of his would translate into a vote for a progressive. I believe he's a conservative, possibly of the Birther/Bircher wing of the Republican Party. Consider the following points:

1. Santa Claus is the Bernie Madoff of joy- he's perpetually jolly regardless of global circumstances. Year after year, he shows growth in happiness in contrast to the rest of humanity, where happiness ebbs and flows depending on actual events. In addition, studies show that liberals tend to be less happy than conservatives because of their nuanced view of the world and empathy towards others.

2. He's fat and children leave him cookies as tribute. Odds are that Santa would disapprove of legislation designed to eliminate unhealthy food choices, such as delicious cookies. Think of Chris Christie in a red and white suit.

3. Mr. Claus keeps Mrs. Claus in her place. We barely know a thing about her and she spends the majority of her time in the house- traditional marriage at its best. And what's with making her mirror him in dress at all times? That's disturbing.

4. He keeps Hoover-esque lists. He has a fetish for prying into your personal life without government oversight and relishes in using it against you. In order to determine who has been naughty or nice, Santa crosses the line from time to time. If you want a mental reference point, he's operating a level above the NSA, but just below God.

5. K. Kringle clearly runs a non-union shop and employs child-like labor. How else do you think all of the world's Christmas presents are made? It stands to reason that the North Pole is one of those "economic freedom zones" that operate outside the jurisdiction of meaningful labor laws. The cost of buying material from distant places and picking it up would eat into excess profits of cookies and milk, even considering the boost his bottomless bag provides when transporting goods.

Everything we know about this man screams conservative. He's not a lovable progressive looking to spread his good will throughout the world. Santa Claus is a jolly ol' jerk that profits from child-like labor. 

Political Philosophy

I always found philosophy to be a useless intellectual artifact. To me, philosophy, especially political philosophy, is two people arguing about how to feed the starving man begging at their feet. Just give him some fucking fish already.

However, last year, writer Michael Lewis gave a commencement speech at Princeton, and he said something beautiful that resonated with me. It's become the closest thing to a political philosophy I have because it's rooted in reality and facts on the ground. This is what he said:

"Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky."

You're damn right we do.

Dick Is Ragged

The following are brief excerpts of a startling find in Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence (another must read). Start on LOC 580 on the Kindle in Chapter 2 (who does page numbers anymore?). I'm going to type the most important fact in all caps because it blew my fucking mind:

"Most of what we know about long-term income-mobility trends in the US during the previous half century comes from the University of Michigan's Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal study of more than nine thousand families from across the continental United States begun in 1968. PSID is the world's longest running "panel survey" of nationally representative households."

"PSID's snapshot was absolutely clear in one respect: it enabled scholars to discover that they had previously underestimated, to a significant degree, the extent to which, in the words of Gary Solon, "income status is transmitted from one generation to the next."

"In 1992, Solon wrote a paper on income heritability (IH), using PSID data, to show previous estimates of 20% IH to be low. He found that it was 40% or higher."

"In 2001, Bhashkar Mazmuder, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recalculated income heritability matching census data to Social Security data, which allowed him to compare parent-child income over a greater number of years. He found that income heritability was more like 50-60%."

"HE FOUND THE NOTIONAL HERITABILITY OF INCOME TO APPROXIMATE THE LITERAL HERITABILITY OF HEIGHT. Most strikingly, Mazmuder found that income among brothers actually correlated more closely than height and weight."

"I am less the master of my fate than I am of my body mass index."

Horatio Alger can kiss my ass.

What Liberals Once Understood

Liberals once understood that negotiating with morons only emboldens and legitimizes the morons. Team Obama didn't understand that lesson in 2008 and they still don't understand it today. Here's the instructive quote from Rick Perlstein's article in The Nation last year:

"Ironically, liberals of previous generations understood this better than we do now, despite decades more experience watching how the right’s game is played. For a Partisan Review symposium in 1962, Harvard sociologist David Riesman advised that the Kennedy administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…only by combatting the radical right rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the right can always go still further right and will.”

Read that last part again. The administration “can gain the leeway on the domestic front…ONLY BY COMBATTING THE RADICAL RIGHT, rather than seeking itself to move onto rightist ground—an illusory operation since the RIGHT CAN ALWAYS GO STILL FURTHER RIGHT AND WILL."

And that's where we are now- successive centrist Democratic administrations have sought political support from dittoheads, conspiracy theorists, libertarian ideological sycophants, and Jesus freaks. At what point were these people ever going to vote for high capital gains taxes, abortion rights, and environmental regulations?

The #GOP just keeps drifting to the right, leading us down a path to their version of an economic utopia- austerity, which could never pass without support from misguided Democratic Party members, convinced bipartisanship is the electoral elixir that will keep them in office. It might, until the #GOP decides that individual health care mandates are suddenly socialist and now you're no longer an "independent minded, middle of the road small d."

We can take this country back, but we have to be aggressive in our progressivism to do so.