Happy birthday, Captain Kirk!

Hear him sing Rocket Man (1978)

(yes, the 70s were that bad)

The Tice Tribune Strikes Again, This Time On Teaching

The War on Teachers is in full swing over at the Tice Tribune. Marshall Tanick (via Rob Levine over at The Cucking Stool) has the details:

The editorial told only half of the story, and got that part wrong. As the attorney for the prevailing principal, I feel obliged to correct those mistaken impressions…

…The court ruled against the superintendent because she consciously and deliberately bypassed the notice and hearing requirement for no apparent reason, stripping Murphy of significant job responsibilities that she carried out well for many years…

The editorial opined, as did the school district in the lawsuit, that the reassignment was a mere trifle because Murphy retained her same salary….[but] The law currently defines a “demotion,” which triggers a right for a notice and hearing, to consist of a “reduction in rank,” defined as a diminution of duties or a decrease in compensation. Both occurred in this particular case.

The principal’s duties were changed from overseeing a facility and its staff to more menial duties, including lunchroom supervision. The offense in this case was not merely a matter of modifying a “title,” as the editorial suggested, but a major reduction of the educator’s role that could affect her if seeking a job elsewhere as well as promotional opportunities internally.

Ooops.

The darkness before dawn

Yves Smith:

One thing I have never understood in America is the way that people who lose their jobs become pariahs in the job market.
…
I’d argue that the roots lie in a fundamental change in policy that took place around 1980. The lesson that economists drew from the stagflation of the 1970s was that labor had too much bargaining power. The excessive fiscal stimulus of the later 1960s and the oil price shocks of the 1970s had been amplified by the fact that workers had enough clout to demand and get wage increases when they faces sustained price increases. That of course led to more price increases since higher wages led to higher production costs which led business owners to increase prices of their goods and servicer, thus accelerating the inflation already under way.

The solution, per neoclassical economists, was to use unemployment to keep wage demands in check.
…
Before, there had been an explicit agreement between unions and employers embodied in the so-called Treaty of Detroit, which was that workers were to share in productivity gains. President Kennedy even warned major corporations that if they did not adhere to this understanding, he’d push through legislation to make sure they did.
…
This bias against those out of work is long-standing, although it has gotten worse over time. Talented people over 40 who have lost a corporate perch are pretty much unemployable….

This creation of a “reserve army of the unemployed,” which is what the capitalists of this country have managed to create, is from the Marxist playbook: in Marx’s view, successful capitalism required what we now call a flexible workforce. One can see other elements of right-wing policy as emanating from this fundamentally Marxist viewpoint. Breaking unions, crashing Social Security, ending the minimum wage– all of these are obvious methods of flooding the labor market with cheap labor.

But here’s a less obvious example: the hostility of the right toward not just abortion but towards contraception that emerged during the Reagan years is a fundamental cause of the existence of enormous populations of the young in the developing world… populations which are largely unemployed, desperate, and willing to work for less. Now, hostility toward contraception is certainly consistent with the patriarchal view of the Catholic Church. But consider how ineffective they would be if the wealthy said that population growth of the browner masses endangered their control. To caricature a bit, that’s why so many right-wingers were attracted to Margaret Sanger, and why throughout the sixties and seventies so many right-wingers favored not only contraception but abortion.

As on Animal Farm, we discover at last that, in many ways, there is no fundamental difference between communists and capitalists. They both view a successful capitalism as one in which many people are unemployed. But, as we see in Egypt, if there are people to teach the unemployed about what is going on, so that their idleness does not decay into despair, there are other outcomes. It was mostly unemployed young men who beat back Mubarak’s police.

May this period of darkness be the prelude to the dawn of a new awakening of the American spirit, one that is determined that never again will disproportionate wealth and power be allowed to bring disaster upon us. And may no one come to believe that because s/he is unemployed, s/he is of no worth.

Republicans Are Bad At Math: Mike Parry Edition

Hot on the heels of Linda Runbeck’s property-tax fantasies, we have Mike Parry’s double-talk, as documented by Sally Jo Sorensen of Bluestem Prairie:

Within a week of introducing a bill to cut the state’s contribution to public employees’ retirement benefit, Mike Parry told constituents at a Town Hall meeting in Owatonna that those who are public employees will be get bigger pensions under his plan.

Say what? Here comes Clare Kennedy of the Owatonna People’s Press to clarify:

This apparent contradiction [see below] ruffled many in the room who were already upset about two other forthcoming proposals: A 6 percent pay cut for public employees and a “shift” in pension plans that would cut 3 percent from the state’s contribution on the fund. The employees would be obliged to make up the difference.

At one point, Parry characterized the pension bill as an increase.

“Why wouldn’t you want an extra 3 percent in your pension for when you retire?” Parry said.

“I’m not getting an extra 3 percent. I’m getting to pay an extra 3 percent because you’re reducing my employer’s contribution to it,” Driskell said. “And you are cutting me, sir. You’re cutting 15 percent of my co-workers, which may well be me, and you’re cutting 6 percent of my salary. You are cutting me. Don’t tell me you’re not. I have a brain.”

Even better: As Sally Jo Sorensen points out, the “apparent contradiction” referenced by Clare Kennedy is that Parry criticized Governor Dayton’s plan to trim the state’s workforce by six percent, even as proposals coming from his caucus call for fifteen percent cuts!

Ms. Kennedy calls that a contradiction; I call that hypocrisy, double-talk, and horsepucky.

(Crossposted to Renaissance Post.)

OAS slams US over human rights

This comes via Avedon, Diane of Cabdrollery, and the Kirk Semple of the NY Times comes this report by the OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights scalding the US for its treatment of immigrants:

The United States Supreme Court itself has upheld the constitutionality of mandatory detention in immigration cases that have not been decided, despite the fact that the violations alleged are civil in nature,
and despite the loss of liberty that detention presupposes.
…
The Inter‐American Commission finds that ICE has failed to develop an oversight and accountability system to ensure that these local partners do not enforce immigration law in a discriminatory manner by resorting to racial profiling and that their practices do not use the supposed investigation of crimes as a pretext to prosecute and detain undocumented migrants.
…
It must be reiterated that detention is a disproportionate measure in many if not the majority of cases, and that the programs that provide for alternatives to detention constitutes a more balanced way for the State to ensure compliance with immigration laws.
…
In this report the IACHR also stresses that even in those cases in which detention is strictly necessary, there is no genuinely civil system where the general conditions comply with standards of respect for human dignity and humane treatment; there is also a lack of the special conditions required for in cases of non‐punitive detention. As developed above, the IACHR is further troubled by the frequent outsourcing of the management and personal care of immigration detainees to private contractors.

Until recently, one would say that the US controls the OAS. Very clearly, the power of the ancien régime is declining. The first comment is the most damning. It says that our highest court is acting contrary to very fundamental precepts of law, allowing people to be deprived of liberty in civil cases. Another famous example of this sort of abuse is debtor’s prisons.

But, hey, laws are for the little guys to obey and for our Imperial Court to invent.

Cats, Humans of Japan’s “Cat Island” Survived Quake, Tsunami; Could Use Some Help

Because we all could use some good news:

Tashirojima, otherwise known as Japan’s “Cat Island” due to its numerous feline inhabitants, is intact after the recent devastating 9-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami, according to Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and Support. However, like so many others devastated by the disaster, both the human and feline residents of the island need help.

Contact Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue for more information.

Saturday News Roundup

>– The focal point for the latest phase of the class war is the Midwest. If the tide can be turned in Wisconsin, it can be turned everywhere — and the April 5 Wisconsin Supreme Court election is key. Go to http://midwestuniontravel.wordpress.com/ for some dispatches therefrom.

– Mohammmed Nabbous, known on Twitter and elsewhere as “Mo” and an incredibly brave citizen journalist sending dispatches from Libya, was killed last night during a Gaddafi attack on Benghazi.

Twitter has been ablaze with comments on Mo:

bencnn benwedeman
A true hero, Mohammed Nabbous of Sawt Libia al-Hurra, the Voice of Free Libya, was killed in fighting in Benghazi today. #Libya
26 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

monaeltahawy Mona Eltahawy
Damn you, #Gaddafi. Damn you a million times you murderous bastard.

2 hours ago Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

monaeltahawy Mona Eltahawy
RT @Gheblawi: for the sake of our Mohamed Nabbous & all martyrs let’s not stop struggle for freedom, honor their sacrifices and free #Libya
3 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

FreeBenghazi Libya.elHurra
by monaeltahawy

#LibyaAlHurraTV Mo’s wife: “He died for this cause & let’s hope that Libya will become free.” http://bit.ly/e1K8IT #Libya #Oplibya #Feb17
4 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

– Here’s an interesting way to combat corporate control of our politics:

Following last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, Minnesota Democrats are proposing a constitutional amendment to define an individual as a “natural person.” The 2010 ruling gave corporations certain rights as “persons” and allowed them to engage in new levels of political activity. Sen. Scott Dibble of Minneapolis said the DFL bill is aimed at curtailing the idea that corporate entities have the same rights as human beings.

The bill, SF683/HF914, puts forward a simple question to voters: “Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to define ‘person’ to mean natural person?”

“Corporations have been allowed to funnel vast sums of money into elections which distorts our elections and really amounts to buying elections,” Dibble told the Minnesota Independent. “No other entity could begin to match the amount of money that corporations are capable of spending.”

– The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre on why linking to primary sourcing is important:

This week the Telegraph ran the headline “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”. It continued: “Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem.” Lady Warsi even cited this as fact on the BBC’s Question Time this week, while arguing against wind farms.

But anyone who read the open-access academic paper in PLoS One, titled “Beaked whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar”, would see that the study looked at sonar and didn’t mention wind farms at all. At our most generous, the Telegraph story was a spectacular and bizarre exaggeration of a brief contextual aside about general levels of manmade sound in the ocean by one author at the end of the press release (titled “Whales ‘scared’ by sonars”). Now, I have higher expectations of academic institutions than media ones, but this release didn’t mention wind farms, certainly didn’t say they were “one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches”, and anyone reading the press release could see that the study was about naval sonar.

For the want of a nail

Guardian:

Hidehiko Nishiyama of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said backup power systems at the plant had been improperly protected, leaving them vulnerable to the tsunami that ravaged the north-eastern coast of Japale.

The failure enabled uranium fuel to overheat and was a “main cause” of the crisis, Nishiyama said. “I cannot say whether it was a human error, but we should examine the case closely.”

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric, which owns and runs the complex, said it was protected against tsunamis of up to five metres (16ft) but a six-metre wave of water struck Fukushima on 11 March.

This is something important to understand. The precipitating cause of the crisis was that backup pumps were submerged by the tsunami. Nuclear safety doesn’t just involve fuel rods, containment, and waste disposal. Every element of the system has to work perfectly.

There are things we can do to mitigate potential harm from our obsolete reactors prior to shutting them down, which is probably going to take time. For example: get spent fuel rods off site and into real containment in geologically safe areas, so that we don’t have to worry about them going up with the reactor. Check whether backup systems actually work (this is a real scandal for US reactors). Train staff for real-live emergencies; one factor in Fukushima was a delay of several hours in recognizing that this was a crisis, and a delay of several days by the Japanese government in accepting help.

All of these are things that would be done if the nuclear industry and the US government were serious about preventing disasters.

Titide has landed!

Randal Archibold, of the soon-to-be-paywalled NYT:

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest who rose to become the nation’s first democratically elected president before being forced into exile twice, returned home…

Archibold (or his editor), fronting for the State Department adds this:

Amid an armed uprising, led in part by former members of the Haitian Army that Mr. Aristide had disbanded, he left Haiti on Feb. 29, 2004. He has said American diplomats kidnapped him, but the United States has long denied the accusation.

Actually, he has said that American diplomats and military kidnapped both him and his security force using as a threat US-trained “rebels” widely believed to be in the employ of the CIA, with an additional threat the US military forces that surrounded the presidential residence. I guess that doesn’t meet the NYT’s style guidelines.

But at last Haiti has a leader who may be able to end the ineptitude of the non-profits under Sultan Clinton and rally the people to rebuild this shattered nation.

A Groucho Marxist view of the world

Via Adrienne, a humorous take on how and why capitalism also doesn’t seem to work particularly well, by Slavoj Zizek: