Category Archives: jobs

Stealing from the poor

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This mother in Saskatoon had apples stolen from her trees.  She said in the story that her son cannot digest food easily, so she was planning on making applesauce with them, when someone came and cleaned her out.  Luckily, there were some good hearted people who gave her not only apples, but other food, as well. …one could say that she was made whole.

That’s what Law was originally about–someone does something wrong to another and is made to do something for that person to make up for it–that’s what they called “making one whole” .

Now it seems the Law—looking at the person stealing as a corporation– is saying that the corporation had a right to take everything. 

Or –she was at fault for not having a guard dog protect her assets.

Or –she should have had a hot fence up. 

I’m thinking of corporate anti-union sentiment; of bankers/finance; of insurance (both health and home); of pretty much anything in this country where the less well-connected or less wealthy are not being treated in a just manner.

Our apples have been stolen and we haven’t enough folks with good hearts and enough resources themselves to come and make us whole again.

More dolphins beached **edited

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It’s in Brazil this time.

I wonder if it has anything to do with this spill in 2011…

From the link to the story of Chevron in Ecuador:

Such sentiment holds strong appeal to those who claim that people here, like Ms. Ruíz’s 16-year-old son, are dying from the pollution that Texaco spawned. Citing scientific studies, the plaintiffs claim that toxic chemicals from Texaco’s waste pits, including benzene, which is known to induce leukemia, have leached for decades into soil, groundwater and streams. A report last year by Richard Cabrera, a geologist and court-appointed expert, estimated that 1,400 people in this jungle region — perhaps more — had died of cancer because of oil contamination.

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Note that even Chevron agreed that they had spoiled what once was a pristine jungle.  Even worse is Petroecuador has dirtied its hands with contributing to the mess.  Despite their protests, they cannot pass off their own responsibilities.  <sigh>

I found this update to the above story.

You might recall the story of the proposed mining operation in an untouched part of Wisconsin.

I’m thoroughly convinced that these people are not going to be happy until they’ve destroyed every natural habitat and ecosystem.

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Another reason the dolphins might be beaching themselves is mercury.  A report here on gold mining operations and the threat of mercury….a compelling story.

After being poisoned with mercury, Jose Atehortua suffered terribly:

In the ensuing weeks, Atehortua’s molars fell out; he was besieged by ringing in his ears, loss of hearing and appetite, impaired vision and balance, and damaged kidneys — ailments common to acute mercury vapor intoxication. But somehow kidney dialysis worked, and, slowly, movement returned to his arms and legs. Four months later, Atehortua returned to the entable, famous among Segovia’s miners as the azogado who had miraculously recovered from paralysis.

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The above symptoms are common with us on the mercury poisoning group.   I personally had ringing in the ears, diminished hearing and appetite, darkened vision, balance issues, kidney impairment, liver impairment, and dental issues including loose teeth.   The alarming thing of this article is that they are thinking it was just a one time deal, instead of him probably suffering from long term poisoning until one night his body had had enough and gave out.  It took me a year after amalgam placement to start having monthly migraines.  Another year to start showing low thyroid symptoms, another year to start with memory loss and weight gain (even though I was still exercising)….and so it’s not as easily dismissed.  I wonder now if this guy, if he continued to work there, is still alive or if he is, whether he is seriously disabled–mentally or physically.

Now expand all of this out to how it must be affecting dolphins and other sea mammals….one can understand why they are losing their senses and beaching themselves.   Moving the entable to another location, while continuing to enable mercury exposure, is not going to help anyone–human nor animal.  And as in the previous story, why pollute a rural area?  Just stop, already.  Just stop.  Gold is not worth it.  All the gold in the world will not buy back your health….this paragraph attests to that:

Meanwhile, evidence is accumulating that more chronic varieties of the acute symptoms endured by Atehortua are affecting the most vulnerable segment of the population. In neurological tests administered to 196 children in Segovia, aged 7 to 13, 96 percent failed at least one measure of intoxication, whose indicators include attention, memory, language, and executive functions. These data are included in a UN health report, published in January, which describes the mercury situation in Antioquia as “dramatic.”

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**edited to fix goof on above paragraph.

The reality that you don’t hear about…

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…that the folks on food stamps can also be adjunct professors.  This has got to be one of the most sobering stories I’ve heard yet.  What the mainstream media won’t tell you is that college educated WORKING people are also in dire straits because the top 1% are taking it all for themselves, as we see in this case.

Note the comment where some administrator in a hospital gave herself a 90k bonus while paying low wages.

And other comments are blasting the university for her extremely low un-livable wages.   Good God.

Many ask why she didn’t have Medicare/Soc. Security at her age?  The article doesn’t tell us, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say she was probably making too much money as a professor for Social Security.  I don’t know about Medicare, but assuming they also have limits on how much they will pay for certain conditions, and if this was the second time that Margaret Mary had cancer, she had probably reached those limits.

They also ask the question of her being on assistance (food stamps, I presume?) .  Ooookay.  Um, let me explain something to those who think that food stamps are some sort of panacea–they’re NOT.  Even if she got food stamps, which we don’t know by this article, it still would not be enough.   Jaysus H., $10,000 a year?  That is less than a $1,000 per month, before taxes.    Who can survive on that??

Here’s the op-ed from Daniel Kovalik, who may have been the last person to talk to her.  What huge indignity for her (and anyone else who has to beg for food or medical care).

And here again we have the fight against unions for teachers…and a glaring point of why we need unionized teachers, because the administrators have their priorities in the wrong places (themselves and athletics):

While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students.

This would be news to Georgetown University — one of only two Catholic universities to make U.S. News & World Report’s list of top 25 universities — which just recognized its adjunct professors’ union, citing the Catholic Church’s social justice teachings, which favor labor unions.

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What is truly, truly, incredible was the heartless act of the university in calling the police after it was discovered she was sleeping in her office because her electricity was shut off.  Yeah, because Jesus would have tossed her out on her ass, too. /very snarky.
Lastly, let’s take a moment to acknowledge that Margaret Mary was a woman….women are more likely to be in poverty than men.

Statistically, women in America are more likely to be poor than men in all racial and ethnic backgrounds. With over 37 million people living in poverty, over half of them are adult single women. Surprisingly so, women in the U.S. are further behind in comparison to women in other areas of the world. This could be all connected to the gender wage gap, with women earning less money than their male counterparts, and the often expensive responsibility of raising children.

In a report entitled Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families, lead authors Shawn McMahon and Jessica Horning found that 45 percent of American families live on incomes that fail to provide the basic economic security required to support their basic needs. In just four years, the overall financial insecurity rate rose from 38 percent to 45 percent with an increase in poverty of White children and unmarried couples. Children of color were also found at risk of economic security with more than three-quarters of Black children and three-quarters of Hispanic children facing poverty in their households.

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NOOOOO!!!!!!

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!!!!!!!!!!

Bill de Blasio is apparently blessed by the Clintons….he is in the circle.

Peter Beinart should do his freaking homework before writing such a long-winded article on politics….especially when it raises the hopes of those of us who are wise to the Clintons and want to see their grip on politics broken.

 

 

Klonskys Rainy Sunday Blog and others **edited

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Fred Klonsky has an excellent blog covering the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, the NY Post slam piece on Diane Ravitch, and more.

As I was watching Bill Cosby speak on MSNBC Sunday, I thought of the bombing happening in August….and President Kennedy being killed just a few months later…and Martin Luther King just five years after that…the Kent State and Jackson State shootings…

Dailykos Teacher Ken blog on Diane’s book here.

The end of Clinton/Reagan politics.  We can only hope there will be no more Clintons or Clintonites in the White House after Bush, Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush…and I don’t agree that Barack Obama has been quite as Clintonite as the author believes–maybe at first, but I really feel he has started to break away from that in his second term. …especially within the last year.  And I can do without all the psycho-babble of why people choose political candidates….psychology and sociology theorists would like to put people in packages that suits a scientific measure, when people are much more complex than that.  Take me, for example….I am nothing like they would like to pigeonhole me as….

If a person matures psychologically as they get older, they will make their own choices according to their inner voice–not according to outside influences.  I think this is especially true if they are a spiritual person.

Challenge for Steve Perry.  Wow, it is unbelievable this guy is a Principal!  Really on the outer edge in his tweets, rightwinger for sure.  So glad that NBC and CNN are supporting the destruction of the public school system. /very snarky, indeed

HIs “no excuses” garbage is just that–just look at the statistics for how many of them his school serves.  And making a five year old stand up during lunch period because her mother didn’t send her to school with the proper uniform?  Are you kidding me??

Nobody is making excuses…the teachers and parents fighting for the public schools ARE fighting for kids in poverty and in minority neighborhoods who have multitudes of issues to deal with.  Not getting shot on the way to school is one of them…

Nancy Flanagan why all the snark?

A word about competition and profits

Rhee tells Philly how to solve problems.

Michelle Rhee penned an article about how to fix the public schools of Philadelphia. She says it is time for performance pay, so that there is “a great teacher” in every classroom.

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Great.  let’s start with Michelle Rhee’s performance in D.C.  Fail!  Or…how about her taping the kdis’ mouths shut and then laughing about it when they peeled the tape off and it tore their delicate skin off, too, leaving them crying and bleeding? Fail!  Or…how she is married to a predator??  Not someone I would want in charge of schools.

Be sure to click on the renegade video by an attendee to the *cough* conversation of Michelle Rhee and I think she mentions Steve Perry, too.    I love this–passionate public school advocates standing up against the propaganda.   Notice that they tell her they are “at the end” of the program and they try to hurry her up to quash her statement…but that is only 7 minutes into the program…it goes on for another 20 minutes!

The man talking (Perry) uses a LOT of emotional language–a red flag he doesn’t have facts to back up what he’s saying.  And, as the video asks…who are these “wrong” students Perry is talking about?  Not the dreaded poor, disabled, and minority students…that he says he wants to serve and calls Ravitch, et al, racists for not sending them to charters who will dump their butts for not jumping through hoops…..okay, I’m confused….

Also–as the commenter notes–Rhee mocks Hannah Nguyen.  Um-hmmm….but, yes, of course Rhee sincerely wants a conversation.  bwahahahahaha  *snort*  bwahahaha

**edited to take off the school finance link.  Like I said, I was tired last night, and mistakenly put that up.  After viewing one of the videos, it appears that the blog is pro-charter schools.  Or perhaps I should say anti-public schools.  Sorry for the mistake.

Behind the science

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I found the comments in this post intriguing.   I’m like the others with the post itself, however, not too happy with it.

I didn’t know what STEM stood for, so I looked it up:  Science Technology Engineering Math.

I don’t know why education has to be divided into either/or with Math/Science and the Arts.  They both benefit from the other.  I would say Science benefits more from the arts than the other way around, but that’s just my take on it.

The comment on Darwin’s theory being used to justify power over others is spot on.  I don’t think Darwin meant for it to be interpreted that way.  Robert Shepherd asserts that Darwin saw all of us as interconnected, rather than adversaries as the social darwinists would have you believe.  I believe it, too.  That is one reason I became a vegetarian.  I only went back to eating meat because I had gotten sick and was advised that i should eat meat.  I think that we owe it to the animals who give their lives  for us some respect.  Factory farms do not do that.   Once again, it’s following the golden rule of doing unto others as we would have done to us.

Another comment was striking:

Sharon

September 14, 2013 at 7:22 pm

I think STEM is being oversold and that some skepticism is in order. Here is one personal story on top of those articles and the information provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

My daughter was very strong in math and ended up majoring in chemistry at a top-20 school. After college she was selected to be a paid intern in the research division of a successful pharmaceutical company. One year later she started in the PhD program for organic chemistry at a top University of California system school. STEM-speaking, this would all seem to paint a rosy picture for her future because she’s done everything right. Right?

But what she learned from working at the pharmaceutical company and from talking with other organic chemistry graduate students, was that much of the R&D in that particular STEM field is being increasingly outsourced to Asian countries. Not only that, but the pharmaceutical company was inclined to fill its labs with a large number of imported scientists (to save money). Some people have theorized that the reason for the current STEM push is to saturate the market with extremely educated scientists who then get stuck having to accept lower and lower wages.

In the STEM field of chemistry, American PhD graduates, even those from top universities, are not having an easy time finding work. These are people in their 20s who have been very, very self-disciplined about their schoolwork from the time they were in grade school. So, as far as our children’s futures go, pursuing any old STEM field does not guarantee success. But that is NOT what Arne Duncan or President Obama would have us all believe.

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Okay….here is someone who did everything right….and look what has happened to her.   (working for Big Pharma aside….)

Note the comment on Boeing wanting people getting a well-rounded education so they can “think outside the box”.  If it’s for airplanes, I don’t have a problem with it, but there’s just something wrong with teaching children better arts skills so they can find more creative ways….to kill people.

From the commenter Democracy:

The Sandia Report (Journal of Educational Research, May/June, 1993), published in the wake of A Nation at Risk, examined carefully its specific claims. The Sandia researchers concluded that:

* “..on nearly every measure we found steady or slightly improving trends.”

* “youth today [the 1980s] are choosing natural science and engineering degrees at a higher rate than their peers of the 1960s.”

“average performance of ‘traditional’ test takes on the SAT has actually improved over 30 points since 1975…”

* “Although it is true that the average SAT score has been declining since the sixties, the reason for the decline is not decreasing student performance. We found that the decline arises from the fact that more students in the bottom half of the class are taking the SAT than in years past…More people in America are aspiring to achieve a college education…so the national SAT average is lowered as more students in the 3rd and 4th quartiles of their high school classes take the test. This phenomenon, known as Simpson’s paradox, sows that an average can change in a direction opposite from all subgroups if the proportion of the total represented by the subgroups changes.”

* “business leaders surveyed are generally satisfied with the skill levels of their employees, and the problems that do exist do not appear to point to the k-12 education system as a root cause.”

“The student performance data clearly indicate that today’s youth are achieving levels of education at least as high as any previous generation.”

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He/She goes on to mention an article in Columbia Journalism Review by Beryl Lieff Benderly.    It’s really eye-opening to the myth of scarcity of math;/science majors.  It’s not hard to question who is putting this myth out there and why….especially when they are bringing in foreign workers who will work for lower pay.  Is the myth being created so that they can justify bringing in the foreign workers?  It would appear that way.

From the article:

It is a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.

High-tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are repeatedly quoted proclaiming a dearth of talent that imperils the nation’s future. 

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“When the companies say they can’t hire anyone, they mean that they can’t hire anyone at the wage they want to pay,” said Jennifer Hunt, a Rutgers University labor economist, at last year’s Mortimer Caplin Conference on the World Economy.

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And this, which alludes to the point I was making yesterday on the ageism in the corporate world:

For instance, tech companies that import temporary workers, mainly recent graduates from India, commonly discard more expensive, experienced employees in their late 30s or early 40s, often forcing them, as Ron Hira and other labor-force researchers note, to train their replacements as they exit. Age discrimination, Hira says, is “an open secret” in the tech world.

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I saw yet another blip the other day on the nooz of how many tech jobs are going unfilled because “there aren’t enough tech grads out there”….so now, after reading all of this, I realize they’re actually saying “there aren’t enough tech grads willing to work for minimum wage”.

And the whole debate on Science vs. Arts fails to include the argument for being well-rounded citizens who can think critically, analytically, with creativity of arts’ mindset.  I think art that is unscripted allows one freedom of expression that translates into, for want of a better word, “looseness”.  I think science is rigid where art is not (or shouldn’t be), and that translates into humanity’s acceptance of differences.  Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but there you go…

 

 

 

PBS’ Frontline on the Wall St meltdown

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Just in case you missed the link in the Center for Media Democracy article yesterday, I wanted to highlight it here:

http://video.pbs.org/video/1302794657/

It’s really important to revisit what happened and who was responsible….so it doesn’t happen again.  We are STILL paying for Greenspan’s idolatry of Ayn Rand…

Bluntly, bankers can’t be trusted to tell the truth.  They cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.  Ain’t gonna happen.  By nature, bankers are greedy and see everything in dollar signs, and as this piece illustrates, if they think they can get away with something, they won’t let ethics or concerns for democracy get in the way.

The subtext to this story is how Brooksley Born was ignored.  A woman not taken seriously….a narrative of sexism.  It’s interesting that she refused to talk about her meeting with Bill Clinton…makes me wonder if he tried to get in her pants and then called her ‘boring” because she refused…or perhaps he was intimidated because she was not only intelligent but principled, as well.  Bill probably doesn’t “get” principled people…sharks only understand other sharks….

 

This on Phil Gramm, who….wait for it….joined a banking firm after aiding the financial meltdown.   And afterward, calling us “a nation of whiners”…um-hmmm….

Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and an expert on derivatives, said, “No one, including regulators, could get an accurate picture of this market. The consequences of that is that it left us in the dark for the last eight years.” And, he added, “Bad things happen when it’s dark.”

In 2002, Mr. Gramm left Congress, joining UBS as a senior investment banker and head of the company’s lobbying operation.

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Another subtext is the intimidation by those involved.  They created derivatives to be confusing on purpose…and counted on the others to be too embarrassed to ask the question “what does this mean”? Here we have a law professor who understands derivatives, and HE was in the dark about them.

People are intimidated and don’t want to say “I don’t understand”.  I used to be that way, but no more.  Ask away, folks.  Ask away.  And if someone makes you feel stupid by being condescending, then call them on it.  There are some really smart people out there, but nobody knows everything.   And you aren’t going to learn (and understand) anything if you don’t ask questions. If more people had asked questions and raised concerns like Brooksley Born, the financial collapse would have been averted.

More on the ethics of Gramm here.

And here.