Diane Ravitch Talks about “Waking Up the Town” to Face the War on Public Education
I got to meet Diane Ravitch today as she served on a panel at Netroots about the war on public education. She spoke with amazing authority about what is going on in public education now with the overemphasis on testing, the blaming of teachers and teachers unions, and the right-wing money that is being poured into the movement for “education reform.” The best way to experience what went on is to watch the video.
Interview with Sheldon Whitehouse at Netroots Nation Upcoming on Kmareka
Netroots Nation is going fabulously. I am talking with Sheldon Whitehouse’s office and will be doing a short interview with him while he is at Netroots. If you have any questions you want me to ask, please suggest them in the comments. Keep it short and polite!
I attended a panel this morning entitled “Beyond Occupy: What Does a New Economic System Look Like?” The answers included an economy focused on happiness rather than growth. This idea was suggested by Colin Mutchler, who likened America’s devotion to “growth, growth, growth” to the formation of cancer. Others on the panel were more inclined to answer that the new economy needs to focus on job growth and recognizing and valuing work that is currently undervalued or not valued at all, such as caring for the elderly and small children. The panel leader, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, suggested that we need to begin developing “Progressive Capitalism” so that as progressives we are not dismissed as being anti-capitalist, since many of us are not.
Had lunch sponsored by Windmade, a consortium of wind, environment, and business organizations. The message there was about how to respond to the misinformation anti-wind campaigns out there. We have written about the increase in wind power here on Kmareka, and we have had comments from some anti-winders, so this was good to know about. I will begin aggregating news about the wind industry and doing more to respond to the anti-wind rhetoric.
Should We Pay Doctors to Take Patients for Walks?
This is an interesting piece for the way it calls on us to shift our approach and pay doctors and other health care professionals to engage patients in prevention. I have to ask, though: what would the rate of reimbursement be for doctors taking patients for walks?
A Long View on Health Care – Think Like an Investor – NYTimes.com.
I have developed my own argument for how health care can be an important way to invest in economic development in our country. More to come on that shortly.
Headline Rewrite: Spending Cuts and Tax Breaks for the Rich Could Prompt Recession Next Year
I like how the headline on the article linked below cites only “tax increases” as the problem with next year’s budget. While there are some issues with taxes that will affect the middle class, the real issue are staring us right in the face in the text of the article: spending cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy. If we let the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy expire, we would have $221 billion dollars to put toward other things. $221 billion dollars, folks. You could take half of it and put it toward economic stimulus and jobs, and put the other half toward the national debt, and that would go a long way to working on our problems and preventing another recession. So ignore the right-wing propaganda headline, and click on to read about the real problems: Looming Tax Increases Could Prompt Recession Next Year: Accounting Today.
U.S. | Rising innequalities in the United States was a root cause of the financial crisis
As noted by The Economist, “[s]everal prominent economists now reckon that inequality was a root cause of the financial crisis.” Indeed, in recent years there has been a proliferation of analyses supporting this view writes Till van Treeck in Did inequality cause the U.S. financial crisis? published on boeckler.de.
The explanation is straightforward: As the benefits of rising aggregate income over the past decades were confined to a rather small group of households at the top of the income distribution, the consumption of the lower and middle income groups was largely financed through rising credit rather than rising incomes.
Highly Educated…And On Welfare
There is a new reality out there for many PhD’s — the reality of poverty as their ranks increase but the job opportunities don’t. Read on:
From Graduate School to Welfare – Graduate Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Question for Mitt Romney
Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly reports that the Romney campaign has a new slogan, “Obama Isn’t Working”.
Job loss and a weak economy are affecting almost all of us. We who feel fairly secure in our jobs have children, friends, relatives who are out of work.
I am one of those who wanted President Obama to start a new WPA, to make the banks accountable, to break up monopolies so that in future we will not be held hostage by private corporations that have grown ‘too big to fail’.
NYT columnist Gail Collins said that Barack Obama promised to bring us together, but he didn’t promise to bring us together in left field. Clearly we elected a moderate.
Given that, I have never in my lifetime seen such hostility to a president. That includes Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. Barack Obama had to show his birth certificate. He is constantly accused of being socialist and faces a divided Congress. The economic recession is worldwide– as you will notice if you watch the stock market freak every time something happens in Greece or China. Even if Barack Obama had inherited a surplus and a peace dividend, we would be facing some rocky times.
Of course, that was not the case.
President Obama inherited an economic crisis, two foreign wars, and a Congress with a slim Democratic majority formed by coalitions of widely differing constituencies.
We do not have the job growth we need, but the graph shows what we were up against after 8 years of President Bush.
My question for Mitt Romney– ‘Republicans held the White House for 8 years. Clearly their economic policies weren’t working. What would a President Romney do differently from President George W. Bush?’
That is the question to ask.
Providence Ranked in Bottom 5 for Job Creation
You hate to see it, but Providence is really struggling to hire. I am sure Mayor Angel Taveras is doing all he can to put us on the road to job creation, but it’s not easy when his own city is so financially strapped. Full article: Oklahoma City Leads Large Cities in Job Creation.
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