In which I take a look at a candidate who's gone from an afterthought to this week's cause célèbre.

Why in the hell is anyone taking Herman Cain seriously?

I suppose I ask that question as a subset of the question "why is anyone taking any of the Republican Presidential candidates seriously?"

This guy's website is a riot, unless you take him seriously. At that point it becomes downright frightening.

His "999 Plan" -- and by the way I can guarantee you that if he were a Democrat, the religious right would immediately note that it's really a "666 Plan" turned upside down to fool you...who knows, they're probably saying that about Mr. Cain as well...seriously...Cain, the Bible's first murderer...the "999">"666"...c'mon, it could only be more obvious if he had horns on his head and carried a pitchfork -- oh yeah, but back to the plan.

Anyway, his "999 Plan" combines the regressive elements of a flat tax on income with the even more regressive 9% national sales tax. Proponents of the 9% sales tax suggest that it will encourage saving and thrift, but they apparently don't understand that Joe Jones who earns $22,000 a year and Chauncey Witherspoon who earns $250,000 a year both have to fill their cars with gas and eat food to stay alive and that both of them will pay the same new 9% on those everyday expenses (no details on the website as to whether food is taxable under his plan...currently some states tax food and some don't). Additionally, does Cain intend to put his 9% national sales tax on top of the existing state (and in some cases municipal) sales taxes?

For example, California has the highest state sales tax at 7.25% (before you California haters start hating, understand that with municipal taxes added in, some regions of Alabama, Arizona, and Illinois actually have higher sales taxes than California's maximum local + state sales taxes). So let's imagine that state sales taxes remain in place (after all, sales tax is currently a significant chunk of state revenue in states that have sales taxes) and Mr. Cain manages to pass his 9% national sales tax. That gives us a whopping 16.25% tax on most items purchased in California. In some parts of Illinois, your sales tax would be 20% once local, state, and federal sales taxes were applied.

His corporate policies are even friendlier, with corporations being allowed to avoid most of the taxation by hiding income as "investment" and as an added kicker, dividends paid to shareholders are exempted from the corporate tax. The interesting thing would be to see how Mr. Cain would treat dividends on the shareholder's end...currently they're taxed in most cases around the same rate as capital gains, and Mr. Cain would eliminate capital gains. Would he treat dividends as capital gains, or would they be lumped into general income? If he treats them as capital gains, then he could pull off the amazing feat of taking these items from the conservative talking point of "double-taxation" to the la la land of tax-free income.

Aside from the general regressiveness of his policies toward individuals, and the friendliness of them toward corporations, his website is full of meaningless platitudes, which I suppose many politicians' websites are. This little gem, however, is a real keeper:

A dollar must always be a dollar just as an hour is always 60 minutes.

Last I checked, a dollar always was a dollar. It's the exchange rate that varies. Is he proposing to eliminate inflation? To set exchange rates? I'm not sure what the hell he means.

Which of course brings me back to my initial question: why the hell is anyone taking this joker seriously?

Oedipus Complex.

If you want to close the budget gap really quickly, you return capital gains taxes to Reagan-era levels, say 28%.

 

So let's go back to Reagan...if it was good enough for the Gipper, it ought to be good enough for those who claim him as an ideological father...

...except they would most likely burn him at the stake as a heretic if they got their hands on him.

High Plains Grifters.

It's funny how AIG never complained about the mark-to-market rule while it was making them tons of phony money, but once the economy soured and they did nothing about it other than booking spa retreats in exclusive resorts, they're trying to blame the rule for their own poor oversight. Here's a summary of ousted CEO Martin Sullivan's attempt to cast blame on regulation:

Sullivan said that when credit markets seized up, AIG was forced to mark its $70 billion in CDO swap positions at "fire-sale prices" even though it believed the positions would have much higher values if held to maturity.

Yeah, I feel for you. Even though my morale wasn't being pumped up by a nearly half million dollar retreat on the taxpayer's dime, I too can understand how it sucks to have to report on real value instead of what you "believe" should be. I remember trying to get a home loan based on my belief that I'd find a sack of money in the next few months that would allow me to pay off the loan while supporting my crack habit and stable of women too high priced for Eliot Spitzer.

Down the drain.

The Guardian is reporting that the IMF recalculated their estimates of US banking losses to 1.4 trillion US dollars, up from 945 billion dollars. To put that number in perspective, it’s way higher than A-Rod’s current contract and all his future contracts as well as twice the federal government bailout amount. We’re talking Iraq Quagmire War numbers here.

Bush – the latest Republican who was going to “shrink government” but did exactly the opposite (I still can’t figure out why morons out there fall for that line) – has blessed us with the double-whammy of emptying the government coffers for his vanity war, while simultaneously ignoring domestic troubles to the extent that we find ourselves reaping the bitter harvest of the decades-long assault on regulation.

In the meantime, we’re now learning that the sunny outlook on the economy that Bush and his cronies like John “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” McCain is due quite possibly to the faulty information being supplied by private companies (e.g. RealtyTrac) who found it more profitable not to do proper surveys – kind of like the DC Police find it more useful not to take crime reports. Following demands from Congress – in the form of the Foreclosure Prevention Act (why these acts get such lofty names is beyond me – how about the Foreclosure Information Act…that’s more accurate) – HUD conducted its own survey of foreclosures. A sample difference between the private company’s numbers and HUD’s numbers: 500 v. 12,000 in West Virginia:

RealtyTrac, based in California, compiles data that government officials — and journalists — rely on for a picture of the nation's housing market. But in West Virginia last year, it counted fewer than 500 foreclosure notices. New federal statistics counted 12,000 notices in the state, since the start of 2007.

Now I’m not going to go into NPR’s sleight of hand statistics of comparing RealtyTrac’s “last year” numbers to the 12,000 counted “since the start of 2007” (which could be over a year and a half of data). Why do journalists have to obfuscate? It’s clear that RealtyTrac’s numbers are way off, so why not compare apples to apples?

$1.4 trillion sure could buy a lot of homes…and I’m willing to bet much of it did…at least for a while.

Who's your daddy?

The boys on Wall Street are slobbering over the tantalizing piece of meat being offered by our administration, most of whom were amazingly hard-core free marketeers until the failure of that "philosophy" bit them hard in the ass. So after yesterday's historic selloff of nearly 800 points -- brought on by the traders realizing they weren't going to get that hunk of free money just yet -- they regained their confidence that good old government would come to their rescue and rode the bull up nearly 500 points.

After watching this bullshit, is there anyone out there who still believes the market has anything to do with real value?

Are the corrupt companies that ran riot over regulations worth any more today than yesterday?

I suppose the answer comes from how you look at things. If you expect Big Daddy to show up and supply the ransom money to get your sorry ass out of hock, then sure, the company's worth more for the main reason that it's still around. The free market simply isn't free, my friends. It's a myth. A joke. An ideological construct. Lack of regulation doesn't lead to greater good, though it may lead temporarily to greater profits -- lack of regulation leads inevitably to thievery and negligence.

In sports, if you are corrupt and violate basic principles -- such as betting on your own team -- you are banned for life. In some sports (although not the big money makers) if you are caught cheating, you are banned for considerable periods, if not life. If you are a casino operator and you are caught chumming it up with the mob, you are banned from casinos.

I would humbly suggest that the bailout package be reworked to include a ban on top-level executives ever working again in the industry. CEOs of these companies, whose quasicriminal behavior led to this meltdown, banned for life. Boards of Directors, whose rank negligence could cost this country trillions of dollars and our position in the world economy, banned for life.

And please, please, please, could we perhaps have the common sense as American voters to dump the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Neocon free marketeer ideology out on its ass for the forseeable future?

This is not a pipe.

I always knew Ron Paul was a crackpot, the sort of guy who dreams of those utopian days of free-market capitalism that haven't existed since...well, since ever, but especially since we decided that sweatshops and child labor and completely expendable workers' lives were no longer in fashion, but he confirmed it with a commentary on cnn.com. According to Paul, our current fiscal crisis is a problem of too much government regulation as opposed to too little, basically proving that he's been out to lunch for much of the last thirty years.

Paul is correct in arguing that the proposed Paulson bailout rewards idiotic behavior, but his opposition to it stems from entirely incorrect assumptions that the so-called free market isn't free enough. Here's a little sampling of Representative Paul's theory:

The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur.
It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.
The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.
Until the big-government apologists realize the error of their ways, and until vocal
free-market advocates act in a manner which buttresses their rhetoric, I am afraid we are headed for a rough ride.

Umm, it was the lack of "stifling laws and regulations" that allowed the false boom to form, not the presence of them. Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, the government removed many of the regulations that prevented financial institutions from overextending themselves and exposing themselves to massive speculative debt. "Vocal free-market advocates" have had their way ever since Reagan rode into town, and the chickens are coming home to roost. These "distortions" in the market that Paul tries to lay at the feet of government were created and sustained through the prevalent free market practice of speculation; a quick primer on the history of capitalist economics could show you that the cycle of boom and bust -- a cycle not absent but decidedly much more extreme during the heady days of unregulated markets -- has been leveled and controlled through regulation.

Over in the corner, Ron Paul's been watching the deregulation gang kicking the supports out and as the roof collapses he's shouting that the few remaining beams are the cause of the collapse.

Ghost in the Graveyard

Down goes Lehman.

It's been an interesting scene for anyone following the continued fallout of the Real Estate Bubble Boondoggle, when everyone thought -- yet again -- that old rules didn't apply and this was some kind of "new economy." However, money is money, and as fanciful as the imaginary system of value is, in the end it is tied to the very real facts of securing food, clothing, and shelter. So while many of us were treating our houses like printing presses whose very wallpaper dripped greenbacks, and speculators were pretending that their fantasy-laden house flipping markups were linked to "what the market will bear," the financial system -- from mortgage brokers to the big lenders -- was somehow sniffing so much glue that they got caught up in the ridiculous shenanigans of "interest only" and "negative amortization" loans.

Borrowers borrowed on the timeworn failed notion -- easily disproven by even the most rudimentary market analysis -- that prices always go up (not in the long term, mind you, but always...) and that record-breaking housing price increases were inexplicably the new norm. An interest only loan didn't matter: your new home would appreciate 300% in five years, allowing you access to the cash; ARMs that would reset in five years wouldn't matter, because interest rates would always be low and your house would always be worth immeasurably more money.

There's always been a sucker born every minute, but banks are supposed to play the opposite role: they're supposed to limit their exposure to moronic financial schemes by refusing to lend money that isn't likely to get repaid. But Jesus Christ is was as if we were in Carnival time and nothing mattered -- everyone was making money faster than coke could be snorted in the upper floor bathrooms of Manhattan investment firms, except it wasn't really making money in the traditional sense.

In short, the false economy of the housing industry (or perhaps the real economy -- the false part was the presuppositions) had nothing to do with increasing wealth and everything to do with overextending credit, and when the bill finally came due...well, we all can see the aftermath of a bad credit binge. Except this one isn't confined to your overspending on holiday shopping and facing a few bad months in the new year.

My friends, we are seeing the logical consequences of the right-wing's near-thirty year assault on financial checks and balances, proving once again that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

Why the University is not a Business, yet again.

The Post must have a special relationship with the polyanna nutcases over at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading think-tank for economists who are well-rewarded for advancing the view that human life can be reduced to profit margins and that the sum goal of our endeavors is to increase Capital. I can't think of any other reason that the Post would allow these shills to place columns in the weekly editorial columns and weekend Outlook section so regularly. To find something that would balance out the shrillness of the AEI folks, you'd have to run weekly columns by Noam Chomsky, although they'd have to be rewritten by some eighteen year old who doesn't actually understand Noam Chomsky in order to be as incoherent and illogical as the AEI offerings.

This past weekend is a good example, with Richard Vedder's piece in the Outlook section. Vedder gets off to an interesting start, talking about Harvard and Yale's plans to reduce tuition for the middle and upper-middle class (and in some cases remove it all together for the few lower class students they allow through their doors), but Vedder's paymasters aren't interested in the middle-class, except as a fob, and the upper-middle class isn't of much more use: Vedder's American Enterprise Institute serves the mega-corporations and the ruling class individuals who pull those strings, not the middle-managers pulling in 100K a year or even the upper-level execs pulling in $200K. So he tips his hand early:

Yet greed trumps vision, and wealth triumphs over American egalitarian ideals. Harvard and Yale still want dollars from the mostly affluent families that send their kids to Cambridge and New Haven, and apparently just can't bring themselves to go tuition-free. Besides, what would they do with all the financial aid bureaucrats if there were no need for financial aid?

You'd be forgiven for doing a double-take over Vedder's invocation of "American egalitarian ideals." Whenever deployed by the AEI, this phrase has nothing to do with justice or equality -- it simply means that the wealthy should pay the same as the poor. So the tortured phrase, "wealth triumphs over American egalitarian ideals" might make you think he's actually arguing for something progressive like public funding of health care, but no, he's simply arguing that the super-rich should go to Harvard and Yale for free as well. Talk about twisting meaning around to be the exact opposite of progressive. Then he tacks on some bizarre implication that Harvard and Yale won't go tuition free because they want to retain "the financial aid bureaucrats." This moron, in addition to shilling for the AEI, works at a university, so he should be the first to know that universities tend to jump at opportunities to shed departments, and being able to dump student financial aid departments would free up lots of money and space, so you know Vedder's simply got a particularly dull ax to grind, and boy does he grind it.

Later in his diatribe, Vedder lists out some bullet points that he thinks are causing tuitions to rise. The list is hilarious in many ways, but it's also very sad, because you realize when you're done that this sort of poor reasoning is being disseminated by the Post weekly without any sort of commensurate response from someone who actually knows what he or she is talking about. Anyway, here's a sampling from Vedder's list:

Nonprofit status. As nonprofit institutions, most colleges and universities have no market incentives to reduce costs vigorously, improve quality or use new technology -- for example, having students listen to lectures on their MP3 players -- that could lower costs and improve efficiency.

Does Vedder live in a cave, or is Ohio University simply a backwater? Many universities do record lectures in digital formats, and for years before that have used whatever technologies were available (CCTV, tape, etc.) to deliver content to larger numbers of students. Nonprofit status -- the AEI by the way is a nonprofit -- has nothing whatsoever to do with employment of technology, and Vedder deliberately pretends that nonprofits don't face the market or have "market incentives" -- even though earlier in his piece he complains about the cost of new dorms at Princeton, which guess what, is a "market reaction" to treating the students like consumers who need to be wooed not by great education, but by material comforts like superdeluxe dorms:

to increase applicants (a factor in the ranking computations), the school has built the ultimate student-living facility

Seriously, is Vedder a total moron for thinking readers can't connect his reasoning for Princeton's building the dorm to "market incentives," or does working for something as soulless as the American Enterprise Institute simply kill your respect for other living people as sentient beings? But really, the list goes on:

Exclusivity. The need for accreditation, as well as other barriers, restricts new, for-profit institutions that may be more efficient and innovative from entering the higher education field.

Ah, that's right. Pesky things like licensing are driving up college costs. It's true, the need for accreditation/licensing also restricts my neighbor from hanging out a shingle and performing brain surgery in his garage, too. He's always on about that. Of course, Vedder lists accreditation as "exclusivity," trying to act as though this process, which every institution of higher learning (other than diploma mills that you get emails for all the time) goes through, is somehow elitist. I agree with him that accreditation is something of a joke, except I think it's a joke because it's too easy to get accredited. He apparently thinks it represents an insurmountable barrier. Which makes this next point pretty laughable:

No bottom line. Did Harvard have a good year in 2007? Who knows? There are few measures of the value added in attending college, making it difficult for schools to even define goals, much less achieve them.

Apparently, Vedder wants something like a stockholder's report for universities. Again, as a university employee, he should know that those things are readily available, but he's not really interested in the truth -- he's more interested in rephrasing the problem in a business model: "bottom line." Let's throw out accreditation, but let's come up with all sorts of other standards -- imported from the business model -- to determine if the university "did well" -- by which it's pretty obvious in his language above, means did Harvard "turn out good products." Because, at bottom, that's all that humans are to the folks at the American Enterprise Institute -- they're little technicians, or managers, or slop-pickers -- so long as they serve Capital. Whether you've advanced as a human being (advanced in your own terms: learned something you've found useful, felt you understood the world better, etc.) is of no concern to little minds like Vedder.

The list also contains the usual complaint about tenure (limits "flexibility," as if it weren't a sad sad joke that at nearly all universities, you've got a permanent pool of part-time labor who have taught at the university for ten or twenty years because of the needs of "flexibility") and a few other ridiculous assertions that make you wonder if Vedder does in fact actually work at Ohio University.

Welcome to the poverty of the business model. It's been increasingly ruling our public institutions since at least 1981, and through think tanks like the AEI, it's being given a gloss of "scholarship," shoddy as it may be.

Because in every boom the old rules don't apply.

Remember the tech boom? Remember how everyone (i.e. market analysts, industry shills) told us that in the New Economy, things like P/E ratios and actually making money didn't mean anything, because it was all new -- except apparently it wasn't, and when the house of cards collapsed people who hadn't been lucky enough to cash out on time were stuck holding stocks so worthless they might as well have papered the walls with them? But back then, it was all different, and things were never going to go back down...brilliantly asinine books came out with titles like Dow 4o,000...

Remember the housing boom? Oh that's right, we're sort of still in it -- we're on that precipice when the ground sort of starts downhill and then suddenly disappears. Everything changed then, too...houses weren't things you lived in, nice names for a necessity called shelter; no, they were investments, and despite the fact that you couldn't liquidate your investment without risking your shelter, people seemed to believe that the ATM machine called their homes would never run short of cash. We bought houses with interest only loans. We bought houses with ARMs that were only logical if you believed, against all logic, that interest rates would stay at historic lows forever.

But of course they would...because everything had changed.

Well, it's changed again. But we've known that for about a year and a half now, haven't we? It's just that the chickens, to borrow from Malcolm X, have come home to roost. Fairfax County, one of the wealthiest counties, now projects a $220 million shortfall tied to the housing crisis. Local builders are desperate. At least once a week I'm checking out Bubble Meter to follow the latest tidbits -- it's almost as good as a certain website tracking the tech collapse was back in the late 1990s (anyone remember the heyday of this site?). Housing Panic is also very good.

I'm convinced we are a lazy, complacent society that has little interest in examining ourselves. The whole of our culture is now disposable and meant to last no longer than our next paychecks. Even most otherwise intelligent adults have no interest in debating the merits of plans but are rather caught up in the latest fad, the latest "disposable policy," and the utterly unconvincing belief that we live ahistorically: that everything has changed.

This started as a sweet little post Halloween recap, but then...

Last night was a blast. Hung out on the block with all the other middle-aged parents, sipping wine out of Starbucks paper coffee cups so we wouldn't end up like this lady (oh yes, my DC memory is deep, my friends, very deep). Every now and then I had to hand out some candy. It was a remarkably light night, and by 9 p.m. we were inside, lights off, and upstairs. It wasn't long ago that Halloween meant knocks on the door well past ten p.m., with trick or treaters taking a very liberal definition of "costume" to mean street clothes.

The light traffic meant I had plenty of time to sit on my porch silently contemplating the night and watching rats scurry across the yard. I chased a few of them, especially after I got a big stick to flush them out of the underbrush. And speaking of flushing out rats...

George Will is writing his usual nonsense again about topics he knows nothing about. For Will, if the topic contains the keyword "Choice" or "Competition," it must mean "Good." So in this case he's writing about education, a topic about which he's so ignorant, but gosh he uses all the correct right-wing keywords: "near-monopoly," "anti-choice," "opponents of choice," "fear of competition," etc. It's really very tired.

Of course, he gives the game away when you realize he's mainly concerned with teacher unions. Will isn't concerned whatsoever with the poor downtrodden children forced into Dickensian workhouses that liberals and big bad teacher union bureaucrats call "public schools." These children don't exist in his world, because they aren't going to grow up to be little overprivileged bowtie wearing stuffed shirt prigs...his opinion of public education is so low that he imagines all the products of the teacher union enslaved schools will become the faceless trolls who take his plates away after dinner, hand him his drycleaning, and bag his groceries.

Like any shill for laissez-faire capitalism, Will's real bogeyman is unionization, and the specter of living labor getting together to meet dead accumulated Capital on even somewhat level terms terrifies him. Teacher unions just happen to be an especially easy target for him, since teachers are public sector employees. For some strange reason, Will believes the NEA (he generally attacks the NEA, probably because it's the larger of the two major teacher unions) should not look after the rights of its members, and more fantastically he somehow believes that the interests of teachers (the union membership) is somehow at odds with the interests of education. As if teachers are looking for ways to make schools fail.

Like most right wing critics of education, Will couldn't be bothered with actual facts or details about how schools work and curriculum gets set. Again, Will isn't concerned about the children in the schools or the idea of public education itself (for all its flaws, universal public education is anathema to Will's coterie of elitists, since it assumes that everyone -- not just the children of privilege -- deserve education and are capable of learning): he's interested only in dismantling the system that for all the scare tactics (beginning with Why Johnny Can't Read way back in the 1950's), actually works for most students (the job, of course, is to make it work it work for all, since public schools, unlike private schools, can't throw out anyone and everyone who might lower their test scores...).

This reactionary anti-union stance is why Will finds himself defending what he would otherwise deride as a "government handout" (Will is great at cherry-picking his anti-government stances, generally ignoring right wing entitlements and deriding the "Big Government" excesses of, let's say, funding for public education or healthcare for the poor). Here's Will explaining the Utah program that he's trying to defend:

In balloting more important to the nation than most of next year's elections will be, Utahans next week will decide by referendum whether to retain or jettison the nation's broadest school choice program. Passed last February, the Parent Choice in Education Act would make a voucher available to any public school child who transfers to a private school, and to current private school children from low-income families.

Note the hyperbole that he leads with: this state-level ballot about a program that is very similar to programs that have been around a long time in other states (and the District) is more important than "most of next year's elections," which are at the national level, including for President. But that's typical Will. Will touts this government handout because it comes from the "general fund" and not from traditional sources of public education funding, therefore robbing the voucher opponents of the argument that it's taking funding from the public schools. So if you follow along, essentially Will is arguing that the $500 - $3000 vouchers are in addition to funds already allocated for education, and Utah's state expenditure of $7500 per pupil will remain intact. He uses this line to argue that the voucher program, and I quote, "every Utah voucher increases funds available for public education."

In fact, he details the process. Follow carefully:

Utah spends more than $7,500 per public school pupil ($3,000 more than the average private school tuition). The average voucher will be for less than $2,000. So every voucher that is used -- by parents willing to receive $2,000 rather than $7,500 of government support for the education of their child -- will save Utah taxpayers an average of $5,500. And because the vouchers are paid from general revenue, the departed pupil's $7,500 stays in the public school system.

OK, got that? Since Utah spends about $7500 per public school pupil, and the vouchers are worth on average $2000, then Utah saves $5500 per child using a voucher, but the $7500 per pupil doesn't go away. Did anyone else wonder at Will's deployment of the New Math? If the money stays in the system, you don't actually save that money and get to count it as savings to taxpayers, who by Will's admission are still paying the $7500 to the public school system...now in addition to the $2000 for the private school subsidizing voucher.

Am I missing something? Is he not claiming that the original $7500 that would have been there anyway is still there, and an additional $2000 is being paid out, yet somehow the taxpayers are saving $5500? As I said before, Will and education are not exactly familiar with one another...

To seal the deal (and I know you're bored by now), Will makes the argument that Utah's private schools "are operating one-third below full enrollment" and the vouchers will help fill them up. Isn't it funny when a free marketeer like Will starts arguing for subsidies because the market doesn't seem to work the way he wants it? Check it out:

The voucher program will enable demand for private schools to match the supply. A privately funded scholarship program, Children First Utah, for low-income pupils can support only 15 percent of applicants. Although most of the total value of the new voucher program will go to low-income families, the program amounts to a reduced government subsidy for such families -- at most $3,000 rather than more than $7,500 per pupil.

So replace "voucher program" with "subsidy" and you see what Will's aiming at. The private schools are underenrolled because they aren't seen as providing the value for their cost. Rather than make them "compete," as he wants with the public schools, Will wants the government to give them a handout, therefore allowing them to continue to overcharge their pupils. And he returns to his ridiculous, wrong even on the basis of his own evidence, argument about a reduced cost. He's already stated that the $7500 per pupil remains in the system, so we aren't looking at a "reduced government subsidy," but rather an increased subsidy (in fairness to Will, he does say "reduced government subsidy for such families," and technically he's correct: since the family is not in public school, they don't directly receive the subsidy; but he's either lying to the reader or simply too stupid to understand the difference between the individual family and the system as a whole when he argues that it's some sort of reduction in taxpayer burden).

Anyone read this far?

Don't confuse these Supremes with that smooth Mo-Town Sound.

If you had any doubt to President Bush's lasting legacy on the United States, all you need to do is look at the decisions this Supreme Court has laid down in the last few days. Post columnist Eugene Robinson gets it dead right with a strongly worded condemnation of their school discrimination decision as a "turn back the clock" movement:

George W. Bush's packing the court with conservatives is likely to prove one of the more enduring aspects of his unfortunate legacy. Bush appointees Roberts and Samuel Alito have joined Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in a solid, four-justice bloc that can be reliably counted on, pretty much whatever the issue, to vote for turning back the clock.

Absolutely. And we will have these updated versions of segregationists on the Supreme Court, deciding cases of incredible importance, for decades. It's not as if Brown v. Board will be overturned; the new segregationists are far too savvy to re-install a legal system of racial discrimination, especially since it's bad for business. To me, that's where it gets interesting, because it will perhaps finally get us to look at class in this country as a significant category.

For years (for lifetimes even) researchers in the social sciences and humanities (yes, fellow MLA convention-goers, I'm talking to you) have understood the importance of including class in analyses of discrimination, immigration, racism, inclusion, exclusion, etc. However, too many in the US still believe that we are a "classless society," perhaps because we don't have a titled aristocracy, or perhaps because it's not hard to point to individuals who started in one class and ended in another.

Rather than "white" or "Black" neighborhoods, or to take the case of the anti-immigration folks interviewed in the Post this morning we could say "American" or "Mexican" neighborhoods, we should really start looking at poor v. wealthy neighborhoods as the prime factor driving school resegregation, because school funding generally relies upon the local tax base (and the donation power of the parents, which only adds to the inequalities).

This recommendation is not news, by the way, to anyone within education or sociology circles. In fact, this analysis was readily available when I was taking ed courses back in the late 80's. However, education experts aren't generally in charge of leading systemic school policy, politicians are, and it's unpalatable -- radical even -- to talk about endemic sustained inequalities in American society. Furthermore, if you look around DC these days, you realize that having any sort of education background more or less excludes you from taking part in the "grand revitalization" of Mayor Fenty. In fact, I'd be more qualified in his eyes to run a school system if I spent ten years cleaning the squishee machine at Kwik-E Mart than if I had taught for ten years.

But maybe, just maybe, in light of this court's regressive stance, wider populations in the US will recognize the persistent concentration of capital in smaller and smaller communities and individuals as the root of the problem. But probably not.

How Snow White proves a cautionary tale.

I loved yesterday's story in the Washington Post about charter schools. Charter schools are one of those things that sound really good, but are in fact terrible, destructive tools in an ongoing ideological battle between those who support equal access to education and those who would like to see public funding for education, and hence accessible public education, wither away.

Charter proponents of course don't believe this, and point to their dedicated parents and teachers, their beautiful new building, and progressive curriculum. Those items indeed point to the seduction of the charter school movement: freedom to construct innovative curricula, more local decision making on how to spend your budget, involved parents (sometimes charter school enrollment requires parents to commit a certain amount of hours to the school each year). These are good things, make no mistake. However, they are essentially the kickback you receive so that right-wing foundations, think tanks, and politicians can dismantle public education for the majority of Americans.

In addition to public money that charter schools receive -- money that used to go to traditional public schools -- charter schools often receive grants from right-wing foundations that seek to promote the charter school movement, often using the rhetoric of "choice." Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, both bastions of elitist bullshit whose main goal is to concentrate wealth and power, promote "school choice" not for the actual opportunities it affords to parents and children in failing traditional public schools, but rather because it has proven their most effective wedge against the "great enemy": teacher unions. Of course, they can't come out and say it, so they use the cover story of "choice" and the feel-good notion that they're protecting the poor and minority students. Cue violins. They have simply championed these untested education experiments in the most vulnerable sectors of society: the poor and minority neighborhoods that have been excluded from political decision making.

The District of course is a great laboratory; denied meaningful political representation in Congress, we're a great target for half-baked policy because we can't respond except through kissing the rings of the great colonial fathers and asking for their benign protection. As a result, the District is overrun with failing charter schools. How failing? Well, according to the Post, charter schools are actually doing a poorer job educating the children than are the traditional public schools:

The boom has not been hampered by poor test results. Seven percent of charter schools met No Child Left Behind standards last year, compared with 19 percent of the traditional public schools. The dismal results in part prompted Fenty (D) to propose giving the State Education Office the authority to revoke charters.

Neither number is terribly impressive, but I'm willing to take 19 percent over 7 percent any day of the week (NCLB standards by the way should always be looked at with several grains of salt: you can excel in all but one component of the NCLB standards and that one component, let's say special education or attendance rate, will label your school as a failing school.).

The larger problem is that public education is failing large numbers of students. However, charter schools have not proven to be the answer to that question, and once they've done the work of the right-wingers in this country and dismantled traditional public schools and teacher unions, the generous grants from the conservative and libertarian foundations will disappear, leaving charter schools as underfunded as traditional public schools.

If you think there's inequality across the public education system now, just wait until the right-wingers withdraw their devil's share from the system: charter schools will rely more and more heavily upon the parents to make up budget shortfalls and fulfill time commitments. In schools with large wealthy populations, that will be fine: some traditional public school PTAs routinely raise several hundred thousand dollars a year in wealthier neighborhoods. However, in schools with large populations living in poverty, where the working poor take two or more jobs to make ends meet, the donations of money and time will be less available. We will essentially recreate in a more extreme form the inequalities that currently exist.

Traditional public schools have problems. It's true. But the problems don't stem from teacher unions (by the way, it's bullshit that unions keep bad teachers from being fired: bad administrators keep bad teachers from being fired by failing to document offenses or to perform due diligence in the role of supervisor), etc. We need to understand that the schools have been tasked with functions beyond education in our sped-up society, and we need to fund those functions: daycare before and after school, breakfast (DCPS thankfully funds breakfast for its students), increased guidance counselor demands due to decreased contact time with parents, etc.

We are, unfortunately, not a society that looks upon education seriously. We hem and haw about it, produce tired nostrums about the failure of the schools, but as a society we don't want to admit that the system can't be fixed without a massive commitment, both in money and prestige, to the function of education.

I'm going where there's no Depression, To a better land that's free from care...

What will the next Depression look like? It's quite possible we won't have to speculate too long to find out, although I'm not exactly looking forward to that future. Yesterday, the Dow lost 242 points -- not much in the scheme of things, but given that it fell by 416 in late February, you have to wonder. World markets have not been happy.

What free-market triumphalists don't like to talk about is that since markets are based on little more than speculation, they're subject to "boom and bust" cycles, and someone gets left holding the bag when it busts. We've been lucky so far in this country since the Great Depression of the 1930's. Sure, the late 1970's and early 1980's were tight times, with double-digit inflation and at times nearly double-digit unemployment, but you can't really compete with the 1930's, when unemployment ran around 20% for the decade.

Since then, the "free market" has been reined in a bit, with more regulation to stop the most egregious swindling and built-in checks to stop big slides in the market. Now the big question is housing. As the BBC puts it:

Figures have shown that late mortgage payments and home repossessions in the US are at their highest level since records began.

Not a good sign. I often wonder as I wander around the neighborhood who it is who's affording all these homes that sell for $700K and up and all the condos that sell for $500K and up. I know there are people out there making more than $150K a year, but not every homebuyer is doing that, and certainly with the inventive loans that had been dished out until recently (interest only, etc.), it's clear not everyone could afford the homes they were buying.

What will a longterm downturn mean in "transitional" areas like Columbia Heights? Or the north and east areas of Adams-Morgan?

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