Shitting out jobs

It is an article of faith among Republicans that if you just feed rich people enough, they will shit new jobs. All we have to do is wait under their assholes for them to bestow their blessings upon everyone else. Rather like manna. Tony "Baloney" Sutton said it again on Almanac Friday night, "Rich people are our job creators."

Not so fast, Tony.

It's an empty shibboleth, of course. Well, I guess that's redundant.

A favorite author, philosopher, and commentator of mine is John Ralston Saul; he's the spouse of a former Governor General of Canada, Adrienne Clarkson, herself a well known journalist in Canada. The author of a book -- among several -- titled Voltaire's Bastards, that I have cited many times over the years, John Ralston Saul also wrote a "dictionary" called The Doubter's Companion, which is, at turns, acerbic, insightful, and sympathetic, or even all three at once.

Here's part of his definition of "jobs" in The Doubter's Companion:

A job is a result, not a cause. It is produced by a combination of factors such as investment, research, development, markets, consumption levels, disposable currency, political stability, and a positive economic climate. Jobs cannot be created. Economies are created and they in turn create jobs.

There is more to it, in other words, that waiting for rich people to relieve themselves. We used to know that intuitively, before thirty or forty years of the Koch brothers' Heritage Foundation stuffing the Laffer Curve down our throats, and before guys like King Banaian got into the modeling business as a hobby.

People driven into penury are not good consumers; no one -- including rich people -- will invest if there are no customers for a product or service produced by the investment. No one will be hired to produce the product or service. An uneducated, poor quality work force cannot produce good products or services that can compete with goods and services from somewhere that has a highly educated workforce. Unless light assembly is all you're looking for, or jobs in the high fat foods sector.

But if you listen to Tony Baloney and his claque, none of this matters. Just let the wealthy keep more of their stuff, and more stuff will be created as if by magic.

A corollary to this is what I call The Law of Comparative Shitholes:

It is an iron law of economics that given a choice between two shitholes, the wealthy will always flee to the larger one.

This explains why there are so many millionaire entrepreneurs flocking to Somalia to ply the lucrative pirate trade, and why no one is leaving the low tax Somalia because of the fast growth of the piracy-allied industries.
Tony Sutton bestowing blessings from the Bemidji Pioneer

What could be safer than Vikings' T-shirt revenue?

A  tax on T-shirts (and other sports memorabilia, income tax on players' salaries, and assorted other items, too) is back as the way to finance a new stadium for the Vikings. This idea came up last year, too. In fact I wrote about it, here. If the idea can come back, so can my post. Here it is:

- o O o -

Hey Mort, you want the house to buy some of those new Minnesota bonds?

Which ones?

You know, the new ones for the new football stadium for da Vikings. The ones backed by the T-Shirts.

Naw, Eddie, let’s find something safer, some commercial junk bonds, maybe.

o O o

Which is why, of course, the State of Minnesota will issue general obligation bonds to raise its “share” of the cost of a Viking stadium. It would be hard to find a bond house dim enough to buy bonds backed by this:

They [legislators supporting the stadium] say only those who would benefit from the stadium would pay for it -- through new taxes on metro area hotels and rental cars, sports memorabilia and a sports-themed lottery scratch-off game. Those sources would provide $527 million over 40 years, with the team contributing $264 million.

But consider this: the Vikings don’t want a forty year lease; that, and the “life” of Metropolitan Stadium and the Metrodome suggest it won’t be a forty year asset.

Twenty-five years from now, when the Minnesota Rams or the Minneapolis Dolphins, or whoever is playing in the stadium wants another new one, the State will still have fifteen years of payments to make.

Or look at it this way: your sixteen year old says, “Dad, help me buy a car. My friend is selling one that he swears has at least a couple years left in it. He only wants $2,000 for it. I’ll pay you back, every penny, I swear, five dollars a week, until it’s paid for.”

And then you remind your offspring — a sweet kid, really, but kind of a dreamer — that even without interest, it would take over four years to pay off the $2,000, and that the car is not expected to last that long.

Your child then says, “Well, I was kind of hoping you would forget about it after a while.” And most indulgent parents probably would.

But the bond holders won’t.

It is also somewhat, well, disingenuous, to say that “only those who would benefit from the stadium would pay for it .” If T-shirt sales hold up, maybe true.

But make no mistake, this is not a revenue bond deal; it’s a general obligation bond deal that looks to the entire treasury of the state for repayment.

- o O o -

And this will be true this time around, too. The confidence games and flim-flam artistry around the construction of stadiums is genuinely awe inspiring.

Helen Caldicott on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe

Dr. Helen Caldicott spoke in Canada a week ago about the Fukushima meltdowns:



Barack Obama on nuclear power:

U.S. says still committed to nuclear energy

The United States said on Monday it will push ahead with nuclear power as a vital part of its energy mix even as other nations balk at the sight of Japan battling to prevent quake-crippled reactors from melting down...

...President Barack Obama has urged expansion of nuclear power to help meet the country's energy demands, lower its dependence on fossil fuels and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Last year Obama announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build the first U.S. nuclear power plant in nearly three decades.

Think his position might be related to this?

Exelon [which operates all 11 of Illinois' nuclear reactors] and its employees were the seventh-largest source of campaign money for Obama, 49, during his four-year Senate career, contributing at least $71,850, according to the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics.

When he ran for president, the company’s employees gave at least $200,000, and board member John Rogers Jr., chairman of Chicago-based Ariel Investments LLC, was a top Obama fundraiser.

Hope and change!

Illegal Immigrants Pay More Taxes than GE

It's an arresting headline, isn't it?

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy released a report on Tax Day that showed that undocumented immigrants pay $11.2 billion in state and local taxes. While General Electric, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are able to shield their voluminous assets from federal taxation through creative accounting, these undocumented residents are doing their, uh, patriotic duty.

Minnesota's share? About $81.7 million, of which $74 million is from sales and income taxes.

To be fair, corporations also pay state and local taxes of several types. But in a political environment where taxes are regarded as the rich man's curse, it's illuminating to place these numbers in juxtaposition.

In other tax news:

North Dakota Cuts Taxes to Become More Business Friendly. Besotted with oil revenue and the closest thing to Galt's Gulch this side of Colorado, North Dakota further reduced corporate taxes. Somehow Minnesota receives a net inflow of North Dakotans despite their lower taxes. I wonder why?

Just keep that in mind when you see the blatant lies of "The Freedom Club" commercial claiming our recent graduates will have to flee to North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa for work. I will give these folks one thing. Some folks might be fleeing to Iowa, but it's for the marriage rights, not lower taxes and jobs.

Follow me on Twitter @aaronklemz

The federal budget explained

It’s all Big Bird’s fault

A Move On video about the federal budget

Republicans playing with constitutions III

Eric Roper reports on Political Hotdish that Kurt Zellers believes that voting is a privilege, not a right. After apparently spending the evening with Mark Buesgens, Zellers said this on the air, in front of God and everybody:

"When you go to even a Burger King or a McDonalds and use your debit card, they'll ask you to see your ID [to be] sure its you," Zellers said. "Should we have to do that when we vote, something that is one of the most sacred -- I think it's a privilege, it's not a right. Everybody doesn't get it because if you go to jail [Actually, you have to be convicted of a felony, not simply go to jail, or Mark Buesgens wouldn’t be entitled to vote, or maybe even sit in the Legislature; I’ll have to study that one] or if you commit some heinous crime your rights are taken away. This is a privilege."

Hot Dish feels compelled to point out that the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th amendments to the U.S. Constitution reference [Spot prefers “refers to”] voting as a right, not a privilege. It must also be noted that the U.S. Congress in 1965 passed what it called the Voting Rights Act.

And I feel compelled to point out that if you use a debit card, you will NOT be asked to show an ID – I can’t remember the last time I was, anyway, and I bet you can’t either. Voting is, in any event, a constitutional right, is manifestly different than buying a cheeseburger, which is not a constitutional right, except maybe in Maple Grove, but Zellers is so dim he can’t even get his analogies straight.

To Mr. Roper’s laundry list, I would only add this: Article I, Section 2 of the Minnesota Constitution:

No member of this state shall be disfranchised [that means deprived of the right to vote, Kurt]  or deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the state otherwise than as punishment for a crime of which the party has been convicted.

Oh, and this, too: Article VII, Section 1 of the Minnesota Constitution:

Every person 18 years of age or more who has been a citizen of the United States for three months and who has resided in the precinct for 30 days next preceding an election shall be entitled [not may be, only if Kurt Zellers thinks it’s a good idea] to vote in that precinct. The place of voting by one otherwise qualified who has changed his residence within 30 days preceding the election shall be prescribed by law. The following persons shall not be entitled or permitted to vote at any election in this state: A person not meeting the above requirements; a person who has been convicted of treason or felony, unless restored to civil rights; a person under guardianship, or a person who is insane or not mentally competent.

If voting was truly a privilege, we could deny the franchise to, say, people from North Dakota – which, on reflection, has some appeal – or because they have red hair, or because they’re African American or Hispanic.

The fact that Kurt Zellers – demonstrably a constitutional bozo – is the cream of the Republican crop and the Speaker of the Minnesota House speaks volumes about the wattage of the entire Republican caucus.

Update: Zellers is taking well-deserved punishment for his remarks. Zellers does not understand that if some activity is secured to you to do, and it can only be taken away if you commit an act (like a felony), that’s a right.

Perhaps some of you remember – it may still be taught by driving instructors and state patrolmen, for all I know – that  driving is a privilege, too. When I loaned the car to my son for the evening, that was a privilege. But when he reached the age, passed the tests, and kept his nose clean, driving was his right. I have read somewhere, but don’t have a link at the moment, that the Lege is considering putting grades, school, and perhaps good grooming on as conditions for young drivers.

Interestingly, both Zellers’ knot head remarks and and overreaching efforts to control adolescents comes from the same place: authoritarianism, or as I like to describe it when I’m talking about Katherine Kersten, bug-eyed control freakism.

Now that's what I'm talking about

Forget the New Black Panther Party brouhaha where two men at one polling place was hoked up to be some massive attack on the rights of white people. Thanks to The Nation, we now have an example of what real voter intimidation looks like in the post Citizens United world. Less than a month before the 2010 election, every one of the 50,000 U.S. employee of Koch companies received a letter with some "suggestions" about who they ought to vote for:

As Koch company employees, we have a lot at stake in the upcoming election. Each of us is likely to be affected by the outcome on Nov. 2. That is why, for the first time ever, we are mailing our newest edition of Discovery and several other helpful items to the home address of every U.S. employee.

* * *
Included in this packet is a page with some helpful reminders about voter registration and advance balloting options in your state. If you're not registered to vote, your voice cannot be heard at the ballot box.

For most of you, we've also enclosed a listing of candidates supported by Koch companies and KOCHPAC, the political action committee for Koch companies. Of course, deciding who to vote for is a decision that is yours and yours alone, based on factors important to you. Koch and KOCHPAC support candidates we believe will best advance policies that create the economic conditions needed for employees and businesses such as ours to survive and prosper.

"Deciding who to vote for is a decision that is yours..." is what I believe the labor lawyers call the fist inside the velvet glove. The Nation article describes this as "corporate sponsored propaganda" and they're right.

Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and our Kenyan President

That’s the answer. What is the question, Grasshopper?

What are three things that Republicans believe in?

Right you are:

This is some mess the GOP has made for itself: According to a new poll from the New York Times and CBS News, barely three in ten Republican voters (32 percent) say they believe the president of the United States was actually born in this country. The rest are split between believing Barack Obama was born on foreign soil (47 percent) and not being sure where he was born (22 percent). (These numbers add up to 101 percent, presumably because of rounding.)

Republicans playing with constitutions II

These fools have never heard of Near v. Minnesota

Here are bills proposed by the House and the Senate in the Minnesota Legislature:

The Minnesota House and Senate Agricultural Committees recently introduced bills (HF1369 and SF1118) that would make it illegal to record photographs and audio/video at an "animal facility."

If you check, you’ll see that one of the authors of the Senate bill is Julie Rosen,  who is also carrying the bill to lift the nuclear moratorium. If SF1118 is an example of Rosen’s intellectual wattage, it ought to give you pause about her judgment in matters of the safety of nuclear energy. A law enforcement guy, Bill Ingebritson, is also a sponsor.

In the House, the bill is authored by, inter alia, Tony Cornish, the guy who is willing to lock up ten year olds for life, and the tree hunter, Steve Drazkowski.

The initiatives are, of course, classic prior restraints against speech, because clearly what is sought to be prohibited in the dissemination of information about practices at “animal facilities.” Prior restraints were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Near v. Minnesota, which involved another statute that the Minnesota Legislature passed that tried to restrain the publication of sensationalistic, tabloid newspapers. Near is probably the most famous First Amendment case in American history.

I have written about Near v. Minnesota several times, most recently here. You would think that the boys and girls in the Lege would want to avoid the embarrassment again.

Whether it’s the First Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, or Article XIII of the Minnesota Constitution, Minnesota’s Republican legislators prove over and over again that they don’t have a freakin’ clue.

Update: the quote is from an excellent op-ed in the Strib titled, in the paper edition, anyway, Animal abuse won’t report itself, by Gregory Cruz.

A comparison to the tea bag and lawn chair patriots

With all the bleating and whining about bad weather keeping the crowd down for the tea bag rally on Saturday, I thought I should run this slideshow again. It’s of the rally at the Capitol in St. Paul to support union employees in Wisconsin. Note the weather. It was the end of February and the temperature was a few degrees above zero.

Rally to save the American dream

Update: And Michele Bachmann drew only 300 at a tea bag rally in South Carolina.

Now if she had a record, she’d be all set

AKlo has $2.5 million in the bank, and no identifiable opponent for 2012. Too bad she doesn’t have a record of achievement to run on. But I guess at least she’s personable:

"She's pragmatic, smart and hard-working," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, the conservative Alabama Republican who worked with Klobuchar on the [international] adoption bill. Politically, he added, "we don't always agree... but she's a delight to be with."

I looked back over posts written here about Amy Klobuchar as a senator. Here are some of them:

The Queen of small ball

The “klobuchar” as a new unit of measure

We should ask Paul Krugman

Amy Klobuchar, it’s time to get on board

Focusing on the really, really important stuff

I knew Ted Kennedy

Klobuchar disappointment, part whatever

“I hope you have health care, young lady”

Amy, are you there?

Dammit, Amy!

He’s not the baby Jesus

A chat with Paul

Amy Klobuchar, where are you?

Defective empathy genes II

In the original Defective empathy genes post, I described how Sigmund Spot’s early theorizing about defective empathy genes in conservatives was bearing some fruit in recent brain research:

Baron-Cohen [a neuro-science professor in England] believes that the principle cause of evil behavior is a lack – sometimes a stunning lack – of empathy.

Now additional research suggests that conservatives have an overdeveloped section of the brain the responds to fear, the so-called “fear-al lobe.”

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.

"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.

Here’s a little more from the study described in the article linked above:

People with a large amygdala [the fear-al lobe] are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said.

Liberals are linked to larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region that "monitor(s) uncertainty and conflicts," it said.

"Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."

Apparently, this is even, um, apparent, to Oscar-winner Colin Firth:

Both of this year’s lead Oscar winners have published scientific papers on neuroscience. We’ve covered Natalie Portman’s work on frontal lobe development in children before, but it turns out Colin Firth has also just co-authored a study on structural brain differences in people with differing political views.

Update: The unstated implication of the post is that the research explains why all the race baiting and xenophobia works so well for the Republicans.

Who was Atlas, and why did he shrug?

Ayn Rand owns the key to Jason Lewis’s blackened, calcified little heart

Jason Lewis tells a love story Sunday, April 17th about being entranced by the chain-smoking dominatrix Ayn Rand. We must assume that Jason’s love was unrequited, but with Rand, one never knows. (I don’t think that Rand was actually a Shriner, though.)

Lewis sums up Rand’s influence on him thusly:

There are seminal moments in the philosophical underpinnings of everyone's life. Some are recognized, and some, I suppose, remain just beneath our consciousness.

Certainly for me, the crystallization of a worldview that put liberty as its epicenter came into much clearer focus when I read "Atlas Shrugged." Obviously, I wasn't alone.

According to Lewis, he read the book in 1983 – I’m guessing here – in a pubescent fever. I mean, I know guys who read Lady Chatterly’s Lover in a similar condition, and I know it had an effect on them.  Maybe Jason meant it was a semenal moment for him.

Anyway.

Atlas Shrugged is the feel good classic for every piker, scrub, grifter, and Social Darwinist to come down the pike since it was published in 1957. Gordon Gekko summed up Rand (in Wall Street) in three words,”Greed is good;” Gekko can save you a helluva lot of time reading if that’s your philosophical bent.

If you're looking for more stuff with less guilt, why, Ayn’s the gal for you!

Lewis gushes than Rand and Atlas Shrugged are second in influence only to the Bible. This comes, of course, as sad news to Aristotle, Plato, Dante, John Donne, or even  humble novelists like Robert Penn Warren, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee, and many others.

That they would be bested by a hack screen writer is a tribute to somebody’s imagination.

Anyway, again.

Here’s a little more from the worshipful Lewis:

Her philosophy of Objectivism, placing a premium on individual reason and productive enterprise, had always been somewhat intuitive in the human condition. The statist's demand of self-sacrifice, on the other hand, has to be inculcated at an early age.

What made Rand so popular (her books have sold more than 25 million copies) was that she gave validation to millions by challenging the false altruism that remains the basis for modern liberalism to this day.

Collectivism, which uses the power of government to undermine self-interest, was anathema to Rand. And for that she was never forgiven -- especially by left-wing intellectuals.

Lewis is not only a philosophic lightweight; he doesn’t score well in science, either. There is evidence that altruism is the innate state, and it takes distant parents like Jason’s or genetic defects to turn you into the selfish dweeb who writes for the Strib.

So, who was Atlas, and why did he shrug? Probably because he didn’t have a clue.

Update: And now, for your dating pleasure: the Ayn Rand dating service. Thanks to Slate for the link.

Further update: The perverse allure of a damaged woman, a link from Avidor.

The mythology of educational numeracy

The other day MinnCan came out with a new issue brief, undoubtedly written by their contractor 50CAN*, titled Building a Barometer of Teacher Effectiveness in Minnesota (pdf).  The brief is built upon an unhealthy belief in the policy value of suspect numbers in general and student test scores in specific.  Focusing on the evaluation of teacher quality, the brief alleges that Minnesota does a poor job at it, and that what ratings do exist don't have real "consequences," which is apparently hurting education in the state:

Ineffective evaluations. Because teacher evaluations are rare, seldom based on how much students are learning, and almost never have consequences, they have little impact on the quality of teaching in our public schools.

Packed into this one bullet point are a number of fallacies that education deformers rely on for their attacks on public school teachers. These misdirections pale in comparison to the larger contextual omission of the report, and indeed in all of MinnCan's ministrations: Focusing only on teacher quality to bridge educational gaps and improve learning is not likely to change outcomes.  Additionally the way that deformers are approaching teacher quality will in all probability actually hurt educational outcomes.

The factors that influence the success of any particular student are well known: roughly 60-70 percent is due to family and student circumstances; 30-40 percent is due to the school, classroom and teacher. Roughly 20 percent is attributable to the school. That means that only 15-20 percent of student outcomes are attributable to a particular classroom and teacher. Given that there are very few so-called "bad teachers," and that today even KIPP's Wendy Kopp admits that not all people in any profession can be exceptional, there is very little fertile ground for increased educational attainment by focusing on teachers.

Indeed parts of the educational and political establishment have come to this view. Studies by economists have shown great future benefits can be attained, educationally, economically and socially, by investing in children at an early age.  Yet that's not what the education deformers and MinnCan focus on. They are fixated with squeezing blood from the rock of "teacher quality." In pursuit of these dubious goals they are more than willing to de-professionalize and demoralize the teaching corp.

The same is true for general investments in our schools. Research has shown that the school itself accounts for about 20 percent of educational outcomes. Why not invest in schools, making them welcoming environments, open early and late, encouraging them to become hubs for a community. But in Minnesota we're doing just the opposite: over the past two years $2 billion has been withheld from them. Maybe MinnCan will take note of the funding crisis now that even the state's charter schools are having problems.  Alas, so far not a peep from MinnCan about the decrease in funding to schools. All their eggs are in the "teacher quality" basket.

Fascination with, and abuse of numbers for social science purposes are legendary in post World War II America. Led by the Rand Corporation, leading American policy makers sought to reduce understanding of complex human behavior to numbers. According to Alex Abella, author of a book on Rand titled Soldiers of Reason, Rand would “...ruefully acknowledge the futility of trying to reduce human behavior to numbers.” Rand's discovery led to other axioms about what happens when numbers are elevated from being a diagnostic tool into a policy tool. Donald Campbell coined his law in 1976:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

You'd think this would give pause to education deformers who seek to create rating systems built on test scores that would "have consequences" in education systems. At most, student test scores might be useful in evaluating entire schools or districts. Test makers and researchers alike agree that trying to tease out individual teacher effectiveness using student test scores is a folly and mistake. There are too many confounding variables. But in their zeal the deformers have no room for such contrary thoughts. Campbell could have added that such hubris tends to indicate corruption in those who propose such actions.

The MinnCan brief is chock full of proposals to create statistical indices tying student and teacher performance, including the ultimate goal of "Update[ing] our data systems to link student performance to individual teachers and enable tracking of student learning over time." They way they put this idea makes it seem merely a matter of mathematics. If only. It would be nice, too, if we could devise a formula to convert lead into gold, which would probably be an easier project.

It takes a lot of hutzpah to advocate that the state spend enormous sums of scarce education money developing unreliable data systems targeting a small percentage of school teachers who only control 15 to 20 percent of student outcomes in any case. Just how unreliable are these so-called "value-added" measures?  Even the best VAMs have a margin of error of 28 percent. That means an "average" teacher could be rated anywhere from 22 to 78 percent effective. An EPI briefing paper concluded that "value-added measures" were extremely unstable with relation to invidivual teachers over two or more years:

One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers' effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people's notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a "teacher effect" or the effect of a wide variety of other factors.

In New York City, where value-added measures have now been kept for two years,  one teacher reported on his blog that his Teacher Data Report for last year was under 10 and this year is over 95 - an 85 percent change from one year to the next. The teacher reports doing nothing substantially differently for the two years as he is veteran teacher. The New York system, supposedly one of the most advanced in existence, has a given margin of error of 35 points, which of course is wildly exceeded in this one anecdotal case. More honest analysts describe VAM measures as "weak and error-prone." But not the geniuses at MinnCan.

In you throw in Campbell's Law, rampant cheating and teaching to tests, the measures become that much less reliable.  For MinnCan and the education deformers these facts are irrelevant. That is because theirs is a political crusade to privatize and commercialize public education, not to improve the learning of children. Real concern for education would include considering the possibility that your actions will degrade, not improve education, and that there are other, more fruitful avenues which hold promising possibilities, such as early childhood intervention.

Recently the Minnesota Legislature showed what happens when irresponsible organizations like MinnCan propagate false information about schools and teachers. Armed with studies from the education deformers Minnesota Republicans proposed legislation that would have ended teacher tenure, instead basing retention and teacher salaries on value-added measures that included a 50 percent weight on student test scores. This is what MinnCan means when it talks about how numbers should "have consequences."

Far from improving students' education, MinnCan and the deformers at the legislature are instead dead-set on ruining teachers' reputations and encouraging them to quit their profession, all by using bogus numbers and studies. The only remaining question is how much of this agenda will pass, given Mark Dayton's proclivity to compromise on education issues.

*  *  *

*According to MinnCan's prospectus, it will pay 50Can 40 percent of its budget - $1.5 million over three years.

Weimar Republic redux

We’re looking more like the Weimar Republic every day. Without the hyper-inflation. But with the same panicked populace.

There may even be some of you who remember a post that I did after the legislative session in Minnesota in 2009, quoting Sandy Levinson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, who wrote:

Constitutional design buffs should certainly find much of interest in today's newspapers, especially with regard to the oft-argued role of American states as "little laboratories of experimentation." One state is offering us an example of American-style "constitutional dictatorship," [Minnesota]  while another demonstrates in spades the ravages of a dysfunctional constitution [California].

First, on "constitutional dictatorship," there is, somewhat surprisingly, Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a favorite of the Republican right wing (assuming there is anything else than a right wing in the GOP these days) is apparently going to use all of his powers under the Minnesota [Constitution; others] have exercised such powers, but Pawlenty's exercise in unilateral government seems to be of a different magnitude. Perhaps we should view Minnesota as having the equivalent of a Weimar Constitution Article 48, the "emergency powers clause" that allowed the president to govern by fiat. Throughout the 1920s, it was invoked more than 200 times to respond to the economic crisis. Pawlenty is sounding the same theme, as he prepares to slash spending on all sorts of public services. The fact that this will increase his attractiveness to the Republican Right, for the 2012 presidential race that has already begun, is, of course, an added benefit, since one doubts that he is banking on a political future within Minnesota itself (which didn't give him a majority at the last election; he was elected, as was Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, only because of the presence of third-party candidates). One might also look forward to whether he will refuse to certify Al Franken's election to the Senate even after the Minnesota Supreme Court, like all other Minnesota courts, says that he has won. Whoever thought that Minnesota would be the leading example of a 21st-century version of "constitutional dictatorship" among the American states? [when Coleman threw in the towel, Governor Gutshot signed the certificate]  [italics are mine]

Levinson was making his observations about Pawlenty’s exercise of the power of unallotment, a maneuver ultimately determined to be unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court, in a cause entitled Brayton v. Governor Gutshot. Well, okay, it was really Brayton v. Pawlenty.

A similar exercise – governing by executive fiat – is happening now in Benton Harbor, Michigan:

As you probably know, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder recently signed legislation passed by the Republican-dominated House and Senate that gives State-appointed Emergency Financial Managers (EFMs) historically broad and sweeping powers. These new powers allow the EFM to cancel or modify contracts (including with unions) and even to fire the municipality's government.

Today, for the first time, a EFM did just that. According to a press release from the Michigan AFL-CIO, Joseph L. Harris, EFM for Benton Harbor, Michigan issued "an order prohibiting all action by all city boards, commissions, authorities and other entities, except as authorized by the emergency manager."

Pawlenty’s unallotment is of a piece with this action in Michigan. Both are arrogant and authoritarian power grabs by Republican government executives, antithetical to core notions of a democratic society. We ignore or suffer this stuff at our peril. It is in economic crisis when the charlatans appear: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip. {Windrip was the authoritarian dictator in the US in the ‘30s in Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here.)

And by the way, it’s Sinclair Lewis that people ought to be reading and watching, not the shallow pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand.

A thump of the tail to E.C. Fish for a link to the Michigan news.

Update: Governor Scott Walker has a similar plan coming for a state near you.

It’s the hairline

It’s been driving me crazy for weeks. Paul Ryan reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t think of who it was.

This afternoon, it dawned on me.

Eddie Munster, of course.

I think it’s more than the hairline; it’s the eyebrows, too.

Time for teachers to end abusive relationship with the Democratic Party

When will public school teachers and their unions realize they have been sold out and abused by "their" party, the Democrats? There isn't a more loyal constituency of the party, or one that spends more money and time promoting its candidates, yet is repeatedly kicked in its collective teeth.

In the short run a strategy of separation from the Democratic Party might mean more pain, but in the long run it would either force the Democrats to take them seriously, or, more radically, forge new alliances with other political parties, such as the Greens, that would at least have some promise of moral fidelity from those they have given their trust.

Such a strategy might also help destroy the Democratic Party, which has become almost as corporatist and cynical as the Republicans, and open up a space for a truly liberal, progressive party. In any case what do teachers have to lose by changing course? In short order the Democrats have led a campaign that is destroying both their unions and their profession.

The Democratic antagonism to teachers starts at the top with Barack Obama himself. He's such a smart liar that he'd never say he's opposed to teachers' unions, but every action he's taken as president reveals his true attitudes. From choosing corporate whores like Arne Duncan to his cruel and misguided Race To The Top Obama has stuck a knife in the teachers' backs. Race To The Top itself is a staggering anti-union program. To win RTTT grants states must remove all barriers to Charter Schools, which overwhelming replace unionized teachers with non-unionized trainees like those from Teach For America. Obama and Duncan have literally cheered on the destruction of public schools, best exemplified by their applauding the obliteration of the poorest school district in Rhode Island last year.

The administration's embrace of the No Child Left Behind act, which in two short years will declare nearly every public school in America as a failure, is a particular insult. Failure of schools to meet Adequate Yearly Progress goals is to be met by the literal destruction of every school, mandating either the closing of schools or the replacement of at least 50 percent of a school's teachers and their principals, or, alternatively,  the complete replacement of "failing" schools with Charters filled with non-unionized teachers.

Other examples of national Democrats spitting in the faces of teachers abound. Education Secretary Duncan toured the nation touting Obama's Race To The Top with noted education expert Newt Gingrich. Obama himself appeared on stage in Florida with Jeb Bush, praising the Republican's efforts to privatize the state's public education system. Last week's budget deal between Obama and the House Republicans reinstated Washington, D.C.'s controversial and unwanted school voucher program. As Republicans around the nation work to de-certify teachers' unions and eliminate their collective bargaining rights the president has sat on his hands in Washington.

Obviously Obama is happy to receive the teachers' money and foot soldiers, while simultaneously decimating the ranks of those very unions. In the 2010 election cycle teachers' unions contributed over $12 million to federal candidates, parties and outside groups, almost all of which went to Democrats. That was more than any other labor union. If he was a true supporter of teachers and their unions would he work tirelessly to shrink their ranks? Obviously he feels he will get their support no matter how many times he sells them out. If that's what Obama wants then teachers should let him have his way and he can try and get reelected without their support, which he seems to think he is entitled to even as he betrays them at every turn.

Here in Minnesota the betrayals of teachers by the Democratic Party are just as galling. Last month when the state legislature passed the Teach For America Enabling Act 13 House Democrats voted for the bill, along with 11 Senate Democrats. In both the House and the Senate the Democratic votes weren't even needed for passage, demonstrating the Democrat's contempt for the teachers. They could have voted against the bill without consequence, but they apparently believed in the underlying concept that all the schooling that regular teachers undergo is somehow worth nothing more than the five weeks of training provided to Teach For America recruits.

The "liberal" Democratic governor Mark Dayton issued Orwellian statements about how lowering teacher standards will help "close the achievement gap" and "improve standards" as he signed the bill. For the governor the calculation is obvious: He can safely throw teachers under the bus because it doesn't cost him anything either politically or financially, but he comes out looking like a bi-partisan conciliator. Teachers have no where else to go, politically, and going along with the deformers doesn't require any government funding.

In the 2010 election cycle the state's teachers' union, Education Minnesota, spent more than $2.2 million trying to elect Democrats. The teachers' PAC alone spent more than $325,000 to elect Democrat Mark Dayton. Once again, that doesn't include contributions from individual teachers nor their volunteer work for Democratic campaigns.

Meanwhile Democratic politicians groom education deform leaders. The vacuous Vallay Varro, who constantly spews lies about teachers and schools from her perch at MinnCan, funded and founded by plutocrats, honed her deformer cred as education adviser to Democratic St Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. In Minneapolis Democratic City Councilman Don Samuels, a close ally of mayor R.T. Rybak and a legendary teacher hater, once said that he'd like to see Minneapolis North High School burned to the ground. In a newspaper op-ed Samuels accused teachers' unions of creating an "endless cycle of poverty and failure," calling them ""cynical and morally bankrupt." Some Democrat somewhere might have called out Samuels for his hateful speech, but I didn't see it.

Even in liberal south Minneapolis my two representatives - Jeff Hayden in the House and Linda Berglin in the Senate - both voted for the Teach For America enabling act. I fully expect them to vote for future education deform legislation. Predictably neither would respond to email inquiries asking whether they expected support from teachers in their next elections.

Rest assured that as the deformers use the billions of dollars from plutocrats to create ever more reports and policy papers Democrats will either willingly get on board or "compromise" with each new proposal to dismantle education in Minnesota and across the nation. It's well past time for teachers to end this dysfunctional and one way relationship with the Democratic Party and begin to stake out new political ground that at least clarifies what is at stake and build new coalitions to preserve what is left of honest education discourse and policy. Anything less would just be the political equivalent of Battered Person Syndrome.

* * *

The 11 DFL Senators who voted for the Teach for America Enabling Act:

Linda Berglin
Terri Bonoff
Scott Dibble
John Harrington
Linda Higgins
Ron Latz
James Metzen
Larry Pogemiller
Linda Scheid
LeRoy Stumpf
Patricia Torres Ray

And the 13 DFL House members who voted for it:

John Benson
Bobby Joe Champion
Karen Clark
Jim Davnie
Denise Dittrich
Jeff Hayden
Ann Lenczewski
Carlos Mariani
Rena Moran
Joe Mullery
Bev Scalze
Steve Simon
Linda Slocum

The Queen of small ball

Kevin Diaz wrote a piece in the Strib yesterday about Amy Klobuchar and how she was getting ready to run for reelection. If you don’t remember much about AKlo’s legislative record, other than something about swimming pools and suckling babes in airplanes, you’re not alone. But when it is suggested that she has little to show for herself, Klobuchar thinks fast, saying, “Nuh uh. I told the President to appoint the Catfood Commission.”

Klobuchar, now in her fifth year in the Senate, recoils at the suggestion that she's playing small ball to get along in Washington. She points to her role as one of 14 senators who pushed the Obama administration for a bipartisan fiscal commission to tackle the nation's deficit woes.

Really, she said that. I couldn’t make that up. But there you have it, boys and girls: DFL Senator Amy Klobuchar’s signature achievement.

Tenther dreams redux

Most of you are undoubtedly aware that a bill has been introduced in the Minnesota House to nullify the Affordable Care Act – dubbed “Obamacare” – on Tenth Amendment grounds; “they overstepped their bounds,” as constitutional scholar Mike Parry might say.

Republicans in the Minnesota House have included an amendment to the health and human services omnibus bill that would ban the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in the state of Minnesota because legislators believe it to be in violation of the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution. On Wednesday night, Republicans argued that “Obamacare” would “eviscerate” state sovereignty, while DFLers made comparisons to the Confederacy and the arguments used by secessionists during the Civil War. One legislator even proposed changing the state song to “Dixie.”

Here’s more from the Minnesota Independent article about the debate on the measure:

DFLers made that point clear at several moments in the floor debate, but their strategy seemed to be to tie the ban on the Affordable Care Act to the 10th Amendment battles waged during the Civil War and Civil Rights Eras.

Rep. Steve Simon, DFL-St. Louis Park, compared the amendment offered by Gruenhagen [against the Affordable Care Act] to those arguments used by the South during those periods of American history.

“Reasonable people can disagree with the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “But what this amendment proposes is crazy, I just have to tell you.”

“We have a tradition in this country that we don’t just opt out of laws that we think are unconstitutional,” he added. “We had this debate in the 1860s with the Civil War. We had it in 1960s with civil rights.”

Simon said he didn’t want to assert that Republicans were arguing those same issues — that of slavery and discrimination — but that the 10th Amendment argument had been used in those cases as well.

Rep. Simon is correct. Before the election last fall, when Tenther Tom Emmer was running for governor, I interviewed Professor Bill Green to give us a little history of the issue of attempts to nullify federal by state legislatures. It’s twenty minutes long, but it’s worthwhile.

Standing on the Brink: Bill Green on nullification

Meanwhile, the good news on nuclear power keeps rolling in

Got radiation? Well, of course, we do!

Radioactive material from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan has fallen in rain on major cities across the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency has also detected radioactive materials in milk, air and drinking water. The EPA and other government agencies continue to insist that they expected to see some level of radiation on US soil after the Daiichi disaster, and the current radiation levels are not a cause of public health concern. Truthout [see the story at the link] has identified gaps in the government's data, however, and nuclear watchdogs are concerned that public officials are not telling Americans the whole story.

And in other news, the reactors at Fukushima finally put themselves in the big leagues. Now, we have a Cernobyl-level disaster. Congratulations, Japan! We knew you could do it.

The regrading to a "major accident" with "widespread health and environmental effects" puts Fukushima on a par with the world's worst ever peacetime nuclear event 25 years ago in the then Soviet Union.

Japanese officials are quick to point out that the reactors haven’t exploded (that was just the buildings!), but that “we do have some leakage here.”

If radioactivity emitted in Japan can fall as rain in the US, think about the intensity of that rain in the Twin Cities from an accident just upwind somewhere in Minnesota.

Avidor, whose sketches of new shushi menu items are shown in this post, also sent me a link to a website of photos of the consequences of Chernobyl.

I asked for an interview with Sen. Julie Rosen so she could explain her support for the lifting of the nuclear power plant moratorium in Minnesota, but her office demurred, saying it had other fish to fry.