yurbud
yurbud's JournalPA City Defies Court Order; Reduces Police Officers, Firefighters’ Pay To Minimum Wage
Two thoughts on this:
If this is how austerity plays out, who do the assholes carrying water for the wealthy think is going to protect them? For minimum wage, I think I'd let the protesters slip by, or accidentally use the pepper spray and truncheon on the politicians I'm supposed to protect.
Second thought: how much more evidence do people need that the GOP mantra of tax cuts and no new taxes hurt the middle and working class as much if not more than the mythical welfare queens, and infinitely more than the corporate welfare queens?
Amid Scranton’s ever-deepening financial crisis, Mayor Chris Doherty said his administration is going forward with a plan to unilaterally slash the pay of 398 workers to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour with today’s payroll, insisting it is all the city can afford.
That will likely earn administration officials an appointment with Judge Michael Barrasse, who granted the city’s police, fire and public works unions a special injunction temporarily barring the administration from imposing the pay cuts after a brief hearing Thursday.
Many of those workers are police officers, firefighters, and other public safety workers, industries that have been slammed by contractions in state and local budgets since the Great Recession. Congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked efforts to extend aid to the states that would have helped shore up their budgets and keep these workers on payroll. In the case of Scranton, such aid may have helped the city actually pay its workers a living wage instead of a federal minimum that hasn’t been raised since 2006 and has less buying power than it had in 1968.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/07/08/512572/scranton-minimum-wage-workers/
PIC: In Ukraine, protestors mace police
I'm not advocating this for here, but it's funny how much more shocking it is to see the role reversal.
RAVITCH: The Economist calls charter schools "Privatization"
Diane Ravitch worked on education issues in both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations and supported corporate education "reform" until she realized it didn't work except to funnel money meant for educating our kids into the pockets of for profit companies.
I can recall many times advocates of corporate education reform claimed here that charters are "public" schools, which is only true in the sense that they siphon money and the kids easy to teach from the public system.
Charter advocates here might be embarrassed by the praise, as they prefer to call themselves “public schools.”
The Economist recognizes that charter schools are experiments in privatization, not simply another form of public school.
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The Economist articles do not acknowledge that charter schools typically serve fewer children with disabilities, and fewer children who are English language learners. They also exercise the right to remove students who don’t comply with their strict disciplinary code and return them to public schools.
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/07/the-economist-loves-privatization/
RAVITCH: Does Gates Foundation or the Gates family puts profits before kids' education?
Sometimes, asking the right questions can be more devastating than the most in depth investigative reporting.
If every politician who backed repetitive standardized testing to prove schools were failing so they could be handed over to private, for profit education management companies and charter schools with no track record of producing better results than public schools were asked some of the questions here on camera and their reactions posted online, it wouldn't take too long for this movement to go the way of privatizing Social Security.
If you don't know who Diane Ravitch is, she is a former Assistant Secretary of Education, who worked with conservatives on education reform issues until she realized they were doing far more harm than good and were motivated by profit more than the best interests of kids. Unfortunately, too many elected Democrats have bought into the agenda she and many of us are fighting.
Worse, this "reform" agenda that has done so much damage to K-12, is increasingly being pushed for public colleges and universities, who have already been starved of funding in hopes that it would make the claims of failure look more credible.
educators from pre-school to grad level need to stand together to protect our kids' education from becoming the next bubble that hedge funds inflate and then burst, leaving us intellectually living under a bridge the way they did literally with the housing bubble.
Diane Ravitch
The Gates Foundation has more than $30 billion, and when Warren Buffet’s gift of another $30 billion is added to the Gates fund, the Gates Foundation will have the power to direct global policy on almost any issue of its choosing.
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I am puzzled by what I read in the column cited here. I am also puzzled by the Gates Foundation’s persistent funding of groups that want to privatize public education. I am puzzled by their funding of “astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.
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When Bill or Melinda Gates is asked whether it is democratic for one foundation, their foundation, to shape a nation’s education policy, they don a mask of false modesty. Who, little old us? They disingenuously reply that the nation spends more than $600 billion on education, which makes their own contribution small by comparison. Puny, by comparison. Anyone with any sense knows that their discretionary spending has had a powerful effect on the policies of the U.S. Department of Education, on the media, on states and on districts. When Bill Gates speaks, the National Governors Association snaps to attention, awed by his wealth. They are pulling the strings, and they prefer to pretend they aren’t.
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But their disclaimers do not change the fact that they have power without accountability. They want accountability for teachers, but who holds them accountable?
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/05/i-am-puzzled-by-the-gates-foundation/
what's clearest term to distinguish businesses that actually make things and provide services and...
those that make their money primarily from financial sleight of hand?
It's funny that most of our terms for non-state owned business either emphasize the money manipulators like "capitalism" and "free market" or are vague enough to include finance with businesses that do actually provide a real product or service like "free enterprise."
It's a distinction that could be a big help in convincing others we need to rein in the financial sector further and remove it's sociopathic claws from the levers of power without sounding like Stalinists planning the take over of all business.
There is probably already a perfectly serviceable word, but since I'm not a business major or economists, I don't know it.
What exists or if it doesn't exist, what should the term be?
Was Roberts vote conservatism/neoliberalism blinking?
The last time I can remember the right suffering a defeat like this was when Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, but that effort failed because Democrats in the Senate took a rare stand against the right and didn't budge.
What was extraordinary in this case was a CONSERVATIVE stopped the conservative steamroller, does that mean the right has realized the limits of how far they can push for corporatocracy/plutocracy before the people will rise up or was it something else?
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