Once we jettison the deadwood out of the system, the “good” teachers — the ones who can get the right answers installed into their students according to standards set by, among other companies, the corporation that’s keeping The Washington Post afloat — will be paid what they are worth by a grateful citizenry. Horse hockey. People don’t want to pay teachers because they don’t value the work that teachers do. If they don’t respect the sacrifices most of those people on the picket line are making now, what makes anyone think they won’t gripe just as loudly in that glorious future over what the “good” teachers are making, especially if private sector wages everywhere else remain stagnant and income inequality grows?
Charlie Pierce, again noting that the reason “reformers” can gin up crap and animus against teachers’ unions is because people don’t value education or teachers and aren’t taking on the people who pay the average private sector worker less each year. The problem is not that the average Chicago public school teacher makes $74K a year, the problem is why every other private worker in Chicago is averaging $47K.
Seems like the rest of the workers in the city could use a good union. Or a strike.
(via thethirdshift)(via thethirdshift)
This chart contradicts everything Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan argue about Obama’s responsibility to adding to our national debt.
Notice the section in gray on the right. Notice how the blue line, which represents government spending, sharply rises and the red line, which represents government revenue, slips downward. That gray section represents the recession, under which George W. Bush presided, and his budget, which bleeds into the first 8 months of the first year of Obama’s presidency.
Certainly Obama didn’t do much to pull back after that massive spending spike, but you notice that the spending begins to flatten and even fall, and revenues begin to once again rise.
Let’s also look at what spending is included in that increase to the debt: (chart courtesy of The New York Times)
You can argue that Obama did not bother to end some of the spending that Bush started, extending Bush tax cuts, continuing to fight a war in Afghanistan, etc, but the bulk of the debt and the spending we’re still adding to the deficit was started under Bush.
So, if you want to have an honest conversation about Obama’s spending, it would be more accurate to say, why hasn’t he done more to end the policies that his predecesor started and how realistic is it to end those policies without the approval of a Congress that has a leader, Mitch McConnell who has explicitly stated his purpose is to see that the President fails?
By the end of the work day I’m exhausted and dirty…Back at the Labor Ready office, I have to wait nearly 30 minutes to receive my check. The job paid $8 an hour—minimum wage. For five hours of labor, I get $37.34 after taxes. I am not paid, however, for the four hours on call, or the time spent in transit to and from the job site, or waiting to get paid. None of this meets the legal definition of wage theft, but it sure feels like it.
“Everyone Only Wants Temps,” in which our reporter signs up with this economy’s employer of last resort.
“GET A JOB”: DIALOGUE BETWEEN A CONSERVATIVE CONGRESSMAN AND A VOTER ON THE MINIMUM WAGE
VOTER TO REP. C.W. BILL YOUNG (R-FLA.): Jesse Jackson Jr. is passing around a bill to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour. Would you support that?
REP. YOUNG: “Probably not.”
VOTER: “It’s $10 bucks an hour. It would give us a living wage.”
YOUNG: “How about getting a job. Why do you want that benefit? Get a job.”
VOTER: “I have a job, but it’s not enough to get by on.”
(YOUNG WALKS AWAY)
Back before the housing bubble burst, sending America’s economy into a tailspin, hedge fund manager and former CitiGroup banker Bruce Rose was marketing himself as the guy who single-handedly invented subprime mortgage-backed securities. Indeed, Carrington Investment Partners, part of a cluster of related companies founded by Rose, competed with the big investment banks to package and sell mortgage debt to investors. Now Rose and his companies are positioning themselves to feed off the tail end of the meltdown their business practices helped create, joining a foreclosure-to-rental trend that experts say could hurt homeowners even more.
4 april 2012,
Today, in #syntagma square, just next to the Greek parliament, a 77 year old man shot himself in the head. His last words, according to passers-by, were “I don’t want to leave a debt on my children”. Since this morning, people have swarmed around the tree, next to which the man took his own life, leaving notes and silently honoring his memory.
His suicide note reads:
“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945”
(Note: Tsolakoglou was the first collaborationist prime minister during Germany’s occupation of Greece during the Second World War and the 77-year-old man compared the currently assigned prime minister Papademos to the traitor Tsolakoglou.)
this post’s photo is by @iptamenos3
learn more about this story through this real-time storify post or through twitter via #syntagma hastag
BBC article about the 40% suicide surge in Greece
Left-wing activists try to break down a police fence guarding the Argentine -British Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires March 2, 2012. Argentine Industry Minister Debora Giorgi call on firms to stop importing UK goods in protest at Britain’s position on the Falkland Islands is counter-productive and Britain has raised the issue with Buenos Aires. The minister Giorgi urged company executives to stop importing British goods further straining ties as the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war approaches.
Credits: Enrique Marcarian/Reuters
Chart of the Day: Low-income people care about jobs. High-income voters care about the deficit. Guess which one Congress cares about?
For some time, I’d been hearing stories from my sources in the interstate marijuana racket about law-abiding “civilians” turning to the game because of the recession, and so, armed with introductions, I hit the road to meet some of these unlikely criminals face to face. That’s how, on a hot evening in June, I found myself in Dan’s Northern California kitchen.
The Way We Live Now: Debtors’ Prisons are making a comeback, reports Kevin Drum. When did the 21st century turn into a bad Dickens novel?
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
Saturday is the deadline for Bank Transfer Day, the call for a mass money exodus from big banks to credit unions and small community banks. So: How long does it take? Is it inconvenient? Are big banks freaking out? Here’s everything you need to know.
The top earners are paying significantly less in taxes than the bottom earners. To spell that out in terms the person who made this sign clearly cannot understand, the government decided that the people who are making 350x more than the average earner should not have to pay more taxes.
They should pay less because conservatives believe that the money they save on taxes will be pumped back into the economy, and here’s the coincidence, and you’re not going to believe this: since those tax breaks have been put into place, the country has fallen further and further into debt.
THAT’S SO WEIRD. You mean these people aren’t showering the poor with their money, but they’re putting it in off-shore bank accounts and stocks? I would have never guessed that would happen.
