Undernews For 2 November 2009

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November 2, 2009

WORD
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. --Thomas Babington Macaulay

11/02/2009 | Comments
OBAMA SIGNS ON TO FREE SPEECH SUPPRESSION
Stuart Taylor Jr, National Journal - It was nice to hear Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton say on October 26, "I strongly disagree" with Islamic countries seeking to censor free speech worldwide by making defamation of religion a crime under international law.

But watch what the Obama administration does, not just what it says. . . I'm talking about a little-publicized October 2 resolution in which Clinton's own State Department joined Islamic nations in adopting language all-too-friendly to censoring speech that some religions and races find offensive.

The ambiguously worded United Nations Human Rights Council resolution could plausibly be read as encouraging or even obliging the U.S. to make it a crime to engage in hate speech, or, perhaps, in mere "negative racial and religious stereotyping." This despite decades of First Amendment case law protecting such speech.

To be sure, the provisions to which I refer were a compromise, stopping short of the flat ban on defamation of religion sought by Islamic nations, and they could also be construed more narrowly and innocuously. It all depends on who does the construing.

Is it "negative stereotyping" to say that the world's most dangerous terrorists are Islamists, for example? Many would say yes.

. . The real problem is a provision, which the U.S. championed jointly with Egypt, exuding hostility to free expression.

That provision "expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat such incidents"

What is this clot of verbiage supposed to mean?

It could be read narrowly as a commitment merely to denounce and eschew hate speech. But it could more logically be read broadly as requiring the United States and other nations to punish "hostile" speech about -- and perhaps also "negative stereotyping" of -- any race or religion. It's a safe bet, however, that the Islamic nations that are so concerned about criticisms of their religion will not be prosecuting anyone for the rampant "negative racial and ethnic stereotyping" and hate speech in their own countries directed at Jews and sometimes Christians.

11/02/2009 | Comments
INVESTIGATION RAISES ISSUE OF WHETHER GOLDMAN SACHS BROKE LAW
McClatchy Newspapers - In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman's sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman's maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

"It would look much more damaging," Coffee said, "if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless."

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed for this article.

A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said that the firm decided in December 2006 to reduce its mortgage risks and did so by selling off subprime-related securities and making myriad insurance-like bets, called credit-default swaps, to "hedge" against a housing downturn.

DuVally told McClatchy that Goldman "had no obligation to disclose how it was managing its risk, nor would investors have expected us to do so ... other market participants had access to the same information we did."

For the past year, Goldman has been on the defensive over its Washington connections and the billions in federal bailout funds it received. Scant attention has been paid, however, to how it became the only major Wall Street player to extricate itself from the subprime securities market before the housing bubble burst.

11/02/2009 | Comments
EIGHT REASONS WHY DUNCANS TEACH FOR DOLLARS PLAN WON'T WORK
Gordon MacInnes, Century Foundation - Education Secretary Arne Duncan insists that states should be ready to mandate that teacher evaluation and compensation be pegged to how well their students perform on standardized tests. In the proposed rules for the Race to the Top Fund . . . having a data system that does not block teacher and student identifications is one of just three absolute conditions for receiving funding. The Department of Education will not even read a state's application if it stumbles on this mandate. Here are eight reasons why everyone's time, energy, and tax dollars would be better spent elsewhere.

Reason #1: Tying test scores to teacher compensation suggests that teachers are holding back on using their experience, expertise, and time because they are not being paid for the extra effort.

Instead, the evidence is strong that most teachers simply do not know what to do when confronted with concentrations of poor children who are unprepared for the grade level or content taught. The surge in students from non-English speaking families further complicates teachers' jobs. .

What is more worrying, and should be the object of reform efforts in Washington and state capitals, is that the leaders of most urban districts and schools-those who set the tone and the boundaries of practice-do not know what to do to improve the educational prospects of poor children. Moreover, there is no evidence that the policymakers on boards of education, in legislatures, or in departments of education have a clear vision of how to educate concentrations of poor children effectively. Otherwise, after forty years of serial reforms, the gap between poor and affluent students would have narrowed more than it has.

Reason # 2: The standardized tests in most states are lousy and so are the standards they are designed to measure.

Many well-organized groups have raised legitimate concerns that standardized testing can be detrimental to students by undermining the richness and breadth of their education, and drawing a false picture of academic achievement. But it is Secretary Duncan who has said that he believes that existing tests are weak and easily manipulated by many states, and that state academic standards are too plentiful, too vague, and too easy.

Reason #3: The idea of compensating teachers individually in order to differentiate their performance from their school colleagues defeats a principal tenet of good instruction-that teachers need to learn from one another to solve difficult pedagogical challenges.

The Department of Education is praising higher-performing charter schools such as KIPP that strongly emphasize a culture of teacher cooperation. Establishing such a culture is one of the options under the department's proposed rules that states and districts can use to turn around failed . . .

Good instructional practice can be thought of as being much more like professional basketball than professional golf. The legendary Boston Celtics won thirteen championships through their unselfish play and relentless team defense. The benchwarmers, who sharpened the game of the starters, received the same championship rings as Bill Russell and Bob Cousy. Golfers, in contrast, are paid only when they score better than other competitors.

The last thing we need is to isolate city teachers from each other by introducing test-score driven competition with their colleagues.

Reason #4: Most teachers do not teach a grade or subject that is subject to standardized testing.

By itself, this is reason enough to be wary of the Department of Education's proposal. No framework or advice, or even a vague notion, is offered by the department as to how a kindergarten or French teacher would be evaluated as a part of the new scheme. If the idea is that "we're-all-in-the-same-boat" will govern the evaluation of the entire school, then the teacher-student identification capability need not be one of three absolute conditions for application.

Reason # 5: Even reliable standardized tests are valid only when they are used for their intended purposes.

The state tests mandated by NCLB for grades 3–8 and one year of high school are to measure how well students have mastered their state standards. They are not designed to measure how well teachers teach.

Reason #6: A key assumption of using test scores to judge teachers is that students are randomly assigned, first, to schools, and, second, to classes. Neither is true.

This is a methodological problem that has bedeviled the evaluation of charter and magnet schools, since it so difficult to assign a numerical value for having parents who seek better schools for their children. Ask principals of affluent suburban schools if they could get away with random classroom assignments. The situation is the same in city schools. If Mr. Jones knows a little Spanish, then he should take the recent immigrant from Mexico who speaks no English; the recently hired Ms. Cuccio can take the below-grade level readers; while the veteran complainer Mrs. Green gets most of the kids already reading at grade level. This "selection bias" contaminates the value and validity of much statistically driven research. . .

Reason #7: State data systems are in their infancy. It turns out that it is harder, is more expensive, and takes longer for states to produce reliable, accurate, and secure longitudinal data on students and teachers than widely assumed. . .

Reason #8: The rationale for tying tests to compensation is not clear.

One possible reason is to increase the effort, time, and resources devoted to teaching the content and skills to be tested. However, the consensus is very strong that the No Child Left Behind Act's testing mandate has narrowed instruction too much already at the expense of art, music, social studies, and foreign language instruction. A second reason might be to differentiate among teachers to identify the "slugs" from the "maestros." However, in most schools, one does not need a standardized test to identify the worst and best, and it will not work to sort those in the middle with sufficient precision to withstand the inevitable court challenge. A third reason might be to instill better practice. But if teacher compensation does not keep up with inflation because of poor student performance, then teachers will . . . what? Work harder? Dig deeper? Stay longer? There is no evidence that such measures improve instructional practices or student outcomes.

11/02/2009 | Comments
SEATTLE CRACKS DOWN ON MILITARY RECRUITER ABUSE
M.L. Lyke, Seattle Post-Intelligencer - High school military recruiters who overstep lines can be kicked off campus, under revised policies adopted by the Seattle School Board.

Under the amended policies, recruiters for the military, for careers or for colleges who harass students, provide misleading or untrue information, or become disruptive may be banned from high school campuses for the remainder of the semester.

"It's not OK to come in and lie to our kids," said School Board member Darlene Flynn.

The new rule was part of a unanimous vote amending district-wide regulations on all campus visitors -- an attempt to standardize a jumble of individual school recruitment policies. . .

Seattle has been a hotbed of anti-recruitment activity this year. In May, Garfield High School PTSA became the first in the state to try to oust recruiters from campus. Shortly after, local colleges and high schools staged campus walkouts that temporarily shut down some recruiting centers.

Under the new guidelines, schools must adopt specific recruiting rules by Oct. 3. Those include how frequently recruiters are allowed on campus, and where they can set up. They'll be required to make advance appointments with schools, and schools will have to post calendars showing when those appointments are scheduled.

No one recruiter can visit a campus more frequently than another, and military recruiters must come in uniform.

The guidelines also ensure groups offering alternatives to the military service -- such as conscientious objector groups -- can have equal access to students, at the same time and same place.

Wednesday night's meeting at the John Stanford Center Auditorium was packed with concerned students and parents, some carrying signs that read "Rumsfeld -- hands off our students," "Don't die for a recruiter's lie" and "Money for jobs and education: not for war and occupation."

In emotional testimony, some parents and students complained that recruiters unfairly target low-income and minority children. "They are recruiting people of color to fight for a country that might let them drown in New Orleans," said Jeff Rice, leader of a Filipino youth group.

Many parents and students called for an outright ban on campus military recruiters, even though, under the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act, any school district that allows college and career recruiters but ousts military recruiters can lose federal funding.

11/02/2009 | Comments
SEVEN QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY THAT AREN'T BEING ASKED
David M. Shapiro

1. Why did none of the financial institutions that allegedly needed (and actually received) TARP funds beginning in the Fall of 2008 not warn their shareholders of their precarious financial positions in prior public filings?

2. If senior management and the boards of directors of these financial institutions were genuinely caught short and did not possess actual knowledge of the precarious financial positions of the financial institutions under their stewardship, did they possess constructive knowledge (i.e., they could have and should have known of the precarious financial condition)?

3. If they neither could have nor should known about the precariousness of the financial conditions of the financial institutions under their stewardship, how relevant and reliable were the accounting information systems of these financial institutions?

4. If the precariousness of the financial conditions was neither forecast nor capable of forecast (e.g., the perfect storm), why did some entities (e.g., hedge funds) take significant positions (e.g., credit default swap protection from loss of value of Lehman Bros. debt) from which they benefited enormously after the public dissemination of the precariousness of the financial positions of the financial institutions was exploited by politicians (e.g., U.S. Congress), administrators (e.g., U.S. Treasury Secretary), and regulators (e.g., Federal Reserve Bank of NY) to bail-out financial institutions' creditors?

5. If the financial institutions and the ultimate beneficiaries of the bail-outs (e.g., financial institutions' creditors) were indeed 'too big to fail,' why haven't the individuals responsible for creating the bail-outs acted forthwith to correct such bigness and systemic risk?

6. If the financial institutions (and their creditors) have largely recovered as a result of the bail-outs, why hasn't the U.S. economy created more jobs?

7. If the financial institutions' responsibility is neither job creation in the U.S. nor development of projects promoting the general welfare of the U.S., why were they so important that they had to be rescued by U.S. taxpayers?

11/02/2009 | Comments
RECORD INDUSTRY HITTING BEST CUSTOMERS WITH DOWNLOAD WAR
Independent, UK - eople who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of L77 a year on music – L33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.

The findings suggest that plans by the Secretary of State for Business, Peter Mandelson, to crack down on illegal downloaders by threatening to cut their internet connections with a "three strikes and you're out" rule could harm the music industry by punishing its core customers.

An estimated seven million UK users download files illegally every year. The record industry's trade association, the British Phonographic Industry, believes this copyright infringement will cost the industry L200m this year.

11/02/2009 | Comments
LOCAL POLICE CREATING AN AMERICAN STASI
Phil Leggiere, Don't Tase Me Bro - When the infamous Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information Prevention System) program, which would have "empowered" US workers with access to private citizen's homes with de facto spy powers to report on suspicious activities, was floated by the Bush White House in 2002, the program was thwarted, thanks to a broad (at the time nearly unprecedented) civil libertarian coalition uniting left and right.

Operation TIPS itself was killed by the US Congress, which prohibited the program explicitly in the Homeland Security Act, passed in November 2002.

Its spirit, however, is alive and well, reincarnated in programs like iWATCH, an initiative developed by Los Angeles Police chief William Bratton, designed to enlist citizens to actively look for signs of potentially suspicious behavior and report it to police.

While Bratton and the 63 police departments in the US and Canada which have endorsed the program present it as a 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch, critics claim that, in addition to creeping out America with positively Orwellian promotional videos, iWATCH will encourage a Stasi like network of anonymous snitching.

In the words of the Los Angeles ACLU, iWATCH "actively encourages people to report a variety of ordinary activities--such as people who are wearing clothes that are too big, or who are drawing buildings, or who are doing something else that could be innocuous. That leads toward racial and religious profiling."

LAist reports that, according to the ACLU, "People will report ordinary behavior of people who fit a preconceived notion of what suspicious people look like. And what does that mean for the so-called suspicious person? "[They] could be visited by police and have personal data sent to government databases, where it could be used indefinitely to subject them to extensive searches at airports, deny them government

11/02/2009 | Comments
THE LITERATURE OF BOAT LOGS
David D. Platt, Working Waterfront - As literature, these accounts are all over the map. Buckley, not surprisingly, is erudite and not afraid to describe the contents of his wine cellar or wander off into politics; Silver Donald Cameron, an experienced Canadian journalist, recounts entire conversations with people he meets between Nova Scotia and the Bahamas. He writes movingly about traveling with his elderly dog, and entertains with observations on everything from navigating New York to ordering engine parts to his tourist experience at Colonial Williamsburg. Rockwell Kent recounts near-misses and dangers dealt with, leaving the impression of a man risking his life for the experience

11/02/2009 | Comments
OBAMA CAVES TO ISRAEL ON SETTLEMENTS
Anti-War - In May, the Obama Administration was pointedly demanding that the Israeli government abandon all construction in all of its settlements, insisting that no exceptions could be tolerated and the move was a must for peace.

It took less than six months for that position to be abandoned in its entirety. The hawkish Netanyahu government is now relishing a major victory over the US as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Israel, which has angrily rejected those demands, for their commitment to the peace process.

It seems that President Obama's ambition for Palestinian statehood has given way, in the face of furious anti-Obama protests across Israel, to a 180 degree turn back to the unquestioningly pro-Israel position of the past several US presidents.

Now the Palestinian Authority, once eagerly praising the Obama Administration for pressing Israel, says that Clinton is actually undermining efforts to resume the stalled talks. Since Israel has repeatly ruled out any peace talks with the PA in recent weeks, there wasn't much to undermine, but their frustration is clear.

11/02/2009 | Comments
BRITISH GOVERNMENT FACING MASS RESIGNATIONS OVER FIRING OF DRUG POLICY CRITIC
Times, UK - The Government is facing mass resignations from the official advisory body on drugs after the sacking of its chairman, The Times has learnt. Two members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs quit in protest at Alan Johnson's dismissal of David Nutt in a row over the relative harm caused by drugs and alcohol. Les King, an expert chemist, was the first to resign. He said that the Home Secretary had denied Professor Nutt his right to free speech and called for the council to become truly independent of politicians. He was swiftly followed by Marion Walker, a pharmacist and clinical director with the substance misuse service at the Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. The affair has led scientists to question the Government's wider commitment to the independence of external scientific advisers, and raised fears that experts will become reluctant to sit on advisory panels.
• DRUG ADVISER SACKED

11/02/2009 | Comments
RECOVERED HISTORY: HOW LBJ GOT MEDICARE
Unsilent Generation - When it came to getting legislation through Congress, LBJ-both as Senate Democratic leader and as president-had skills that make Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel, along with President Obama, look like rank amateurs. But more than this, he had the level of commitment -and the spine- required to stand up to opposing interests when it came to a basic need like health care.

[From an earlier post]

December 2008. - An NPR story included excerpts from Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes, featuring his behind-the-scenes efforts to pass the bill that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

The idea of a Medicare-type program for seniors had been debated for more than 20 years, ever since Harry Truman's post-World War II calls for a national health care system. But it was Johnson, famous for his arm-twisting skills, who finally succeeded in sheparding the legislation through Congress. He did so against the wishes of the American Medical Association and much to the chagrin of conservatives, who saw it as a step down the slippery slope toward socialized medicine.

The Oval Office tapes feature Johnson's typically colorful language. As NPR describes it, "Just moments after [the] bill got through a key House committee in March of 1965, Johnson sounds like he's in no mood to celebrate. He gets on the phone to demand that legislators keep the bill moving:

"You just tell them not to let it lay around. Do that, Johnson barks. "They want to, but they might not, he continues. "Then that gets the doctors organized, then they get the others organized. And that damn near killed my education bill. Letting it lay around. It stinks. It's just like a dead cat on the door. When a committee reports it you'd better either bury that cat or get some life in it.

The NPR story is based on an article in this week's New England Journal of Medicine by David Blumenthal, who teaches at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and served as an Obama campaign adviser on health care. Blumenthal thinks Johnson's strategy could be instructive to the new president as he seeks to pass health care reform.

But what Johnson had going for him was not only his skill in dealing with Congress, but his commitment to expanding Americans' access to health care, regardless of the cost. In March 1965, he told Vice President Hubert Humphrey:

"I'll go a 100 million or billion on health or education. I don't argue about that any more than I argue about Lady Bird buying flour. You got to have flour and coffee in your house. And education and health, I'll spend the goddamn money.

11/02/2009 | Comments
INDICATORS: COLLEGE ENROLLMENT HITS ALL TIME HIGH
Pew Research - The share of 18- to 24-year-olds attending college in the United States hit an all-time high in October 2008, driven by a recession-era surge in enrollments at community colleges, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Just under 11.5 million students, or 40% of all young adults ages 18 to 24, were enrolled in either a two- or four-year college in October 2008 (the most recent date for which comprehensive nationwide data are available). Both figures -- the absolute number as well as the share -- are at their highest level ever.

Community college enrollments have long been considered somewhat countercyclical; that is, they tend to rise as the economy worsens. One reason is that community colleges are less expensive than four-year institutions -- they average $6,750 per year (including tuition, fees, and room and board) in the net price for full-time students, compared with $9,800 for four-year public colleges and $21,240 for four-year private colleges.2

Despite the higher costs of four-year institutions, their enrollments have not dropped during this recession. Rather, they have held steady -- and have been able to do so despite tuition increases averaging 4.9% per year beyond general inflation from 1999-2000 to 2009-10 at public four-year colleges and universities.

11/02/2009 | Comments
HOW FREUD AND KUBLER-ROSS GOT GRIEF WRONG
Double X - The idea that grief is work that we must do began with Freud. He believed that if you didn't labor at it, you would never recover the psychic energy you had invested in a person who was no longer there. Over time, psychologists developed ways to describe the various stages of this "work." Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages are the most familiar: Stage 1, denial—"This cannot be!" Stage 2, anger, followed by bargaining, then depression, then acceptance. The stages have great intuitive appeal, but, according to [George Bonanno, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University], both Freud and Kubler-Ross were wrong. The way that grief unfolds for most people is almost nothing like the old model says it should. It is not work, and it doesn't occur in stages. It can be short-lived for some people and never-ending for others. Like breathing and consciousness and almost everything else about us, grief fluctuates. Our biggest mistake when describing grief, Bonanno writes in his deep and intelligent book, The Other Side of Sadness, is that we underestimate the resilience of the bereaved. . .

Bonanno's innovation is to apply more rigorous scientific methods/tools to understanding grief. For more than 15 years, he has given thousands of mourning people standard psychological tests in order to better understand how they feel. As Bonanno interviewed the grief-stricken, he counted the number of times they referenced their loss. He recorded their facial expressions and monitored the activity of their autonomic nervous system (which controls things like heart rate, digestion, breathing, sweating), and crucially, he submitted his results for peer review.

Bonanno and his colleagues found that there are at least three common patterns of grief. Some people find the experience deeply distressing and disorienting but then slowly heal. Some become completely dominated by their sadness, perhaps never to recover. This type is extremely rare. Then there are people who experience some initial shock and distress but who pretty quickly bounce back into the competent execution of their daily lives. Most people, says Bonanno, fit into the third category. .

11/02/2009 | Comments
ALL IN THE FAMILY: HOW EVAN BAYH IS BOUGHT
Eric Jackson, The Street - Evan Bayh, the junior senator from Indiana, is in the middle of a heated debate in the Senate on whether a public option should be included as part of President Obama's health care reforms. An organizer of a group of so-called Senate Blue Dog Democrats, to date, Bayh's been a staunch opponent of any changes to the status quo in this debate.

He's worried aloud that any public option would be a nod to socialism and counter to his principles as a fiscal conservative. When pressed on the issue, he's said he's simply a vessel reflecting the views of his Indiana constituents.

Yet Bayh, who until very late in the campaign last year was considered a top contender to be Obama's vice president, is at best naive and disingenuous, and at worst supremely hypocritical in pushing his views as those of his voters.

His wife, Susan Bayh, sits on the board of Well Point in her hometown of Indianapolis. Over the last six years, Susan Bayh has received at least $2 million in compensation from Well Point alone for serving on its board.

She joined Anthem Insurance (the precursor organization to Well Point) in 1998, when she was 38 years old and a midlevel attorney working for Eli Lilly. Her work experience prior to her stint at Lilly was five years as a junior law professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. Her work background at the time she was appointed to the Anthem board would have been surprising, given that she had no insurance experience and was relatively young and inexperienced to serve as a director on a multibillion-dollar board.

However, Susan Bayh had one competitive advantage that made her stand out as attractive to Anthem: She was married to Evan Bayh -- former governor of Indiana who, in 1998, was elected to the U.S. Senate.

11/01/2009 | Comments
MBAS DISCOVERING WHAT THEY DIDN'T LEARN IN BUSINESS SCHOOL
We loved the line: "I wasn't around during the Great Depression, so I don't know what it looked like then," says Roxanne Hori, assistant dean and director of career management at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile) and a 14-year veteran of the industry. "But [this] is the worst that we've seen."

In fact, MBAs are part of a corporate mythology that hardly existed during the depression. As late as the 1950s our universities turned out less than 5,000 MBAs a year. By 2005 these schools graduated 142,000 MBAs. In the other words, in the 1950s it would take two centuries to produce a million MBAs. By 2005, with huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing gap between rich and poor, a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly and a pessimism repeatedly confirmed in polls, we could produce a million MBAs in only seven years.

Business Week - According to the latest data reported to Business Week, 16% of job-seeking students from the top 30 MBA programs did not get even one offer by the time schools collected their final fall employment data three months after graduation. Last year that was true of just 5% of students. And despite the meteoric rise of salaries over the past several years, starting pay was down this year for the top 30, dipping from roughly $98,000 in 2008 to $96,500. For many programs, it marked the first time since the tech bubble burst that salaries didn't increase. Signing bonuses, too, fell both in value and quantity.

Even students at top schools have been affected by the slump. With MBA mainstays like the consulting and financial services sectors still hurting from the crisis, industries that were once elite schools' bread and butter have hit lean times. The average number of students without job offers three months after graduation at the top 10 programs was 15%, just three percentage points better than the rest of the top 30. Heavyweights such as the Wharton School, the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business are reporting close to 20% of students without job offers.

11/01/2009 | Comments
OBAMA IGNORES CONSTITUTION AGAIN
ABC - The Obama administration invoked the controversial "state secrets" privilege again, arguing that if U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker were to permit a legal case against the government to proceed, he would be putting national security at risk.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement about the case, Shubert et. al v. Obama, that "there is no way for this case to move forward without jeopardizing ongoing intelligence activities that we rely upon to protect the safety of the American people."

The case is a class action suit brought by four Brooklynites alleging that the Bush administration engaged in wholesale dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans in which they were unjustly caught because they regularly made phone calls and sent emails to individuals outside the U.S., specifically in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Norway.

Obama administration officials argued that even addressing or attempting to refute the plaintiffs' claim would require the administration "to disclose intelligence sources and methods, or the lack thereof."

Holder said he was invoking the privilege despite having outlined new policies and procedures last month containing new internal and external checks and balances for the Justice Department to follow before invoking the privilege, requiring "a thorough, multi-stage review and rely(ing) upon robust judicial and congressional oversight."

11/01/2009 | Comments
MAINE TO LAUNCH FORECLOSURE MEDIATION WITH HELP OF COURTS
Maine Public Broadcasting - A common complaint of homeowners facing foreclosure is that it's difficult to reach lenders to modify their loans. The state is trying to help by offering mediation between the parties. Created by the Legislature this year, the program doesn't officially start until January. But it's getting a trial run at York County District Court in Sanford, which has seen the state's highest rate of foreclosures. . .

So far, five judges have volunteered to serve as mediators. Homeowners welcomed the idea of a third party joining in on talks with the lender. They say they were tired of having to work with the banks or mortgage brokers on their own, and getting nowhere.. . .

Under the state program, the homeowner and his lawyer get a half-day of face time with the lender - who would probably participate by phone - and the lender's lawyer. Many of the homeowners had given up any hope of meeting their lender. . .

The state law requires that lenders who want to file foreclosures in Maine have to participate in mediation - or else. "The sanctions could include dismissing the case and barring the refilng of the suit for a period of time," says Andrew Janelle, the Maine District Court judge who is overseeing the program's launch in York County.

Foreclosure mediation programs are already up and running in more than a dozen states. Janelle says Maine's bears the most resemblance to Connecticut's, where a third of foreclosure cases have gone to mediation. In about 70 percent of those, he says, some sort of settlement is reached.
FURTHERMORE. . .
There's been a 9% decline in charitable giving this year according to Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy

In his 2004 interview with the FBI, Richard Cheney equivocated 72 times. Not quite up to the 250 times that Hillary Clinton, in congressional testimony, said that she didn't remember, didn't know, or something similar - but getting there.

Roger Morris on Taylor Branch's book on Clinton: In this writing of history as well as making it, there is personal tragedy. From their 1972 origins, Branch and Clinton took very different directions, the author choosing what he called with justification the "greater integrity"� of writing over politics. Yet what might have been a redemptive rejoining of the two paths in The Clinton Tapes ends in the ineffable sadness of exceptional men using and being used. We are all the poorer.

Ballot Access - Quimby, Iowa, is holding its city election on November 3. Voters will be choosing a mayor and three city council members. However, no names are printed on the ballots. The winners will be determined by write-in votes. Iowa is one of the few states that permits write-ins and yet does not have a write-in declaration of candidacy procedure, so there is no such thing as a declared write-in candidate. Thus anyone might win, even if the person who wins didn't want the job.

11/02/2009 | Comments
READER COMMENT EXCERPTS
BALLOON BOY

Good stuff re the Balloon Boy's balloon. Though without the calculations, I said the same thing to myself when I saw the shape of the balloon (clearly no load at bottom) and first got a view of the balloon that let me establish scale (too small). If one knew the dad's and mom's history with TV (quickly done with Google), it should have been totally clear that, not only was there no kid in the balloon, but that the whole thing was a hoax.

For what it's worth, the shape of the balloon (if fully inflated) duplicated the shape of the "flying saucers" used in a 1950s science fiction movie "Earth Versus The Flying Saucers" The flying saucers attack DC and the clever scientist comes up with some sort of electromagnetic beam that makes the saucers crash into various DC monuments and buildings. The aliens' space suits were black and made them look like neckless robots with a thick flexible skin. - Hugh Sprunt

JUDGE SAYS FOURTH AMENDMENT DOESN'T APPLY TO E-MAIL

According to Steve Buttgereit at Slashdot, the original author stated: "In the course of re-reading the opinion to post it, I recognized that I was misreading a key part of the opinion. As I read it now, Judge Mosman does not conclude that e-mails are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Rather, he assumes for the sake of argument that the e-mails are protected but then concludes that the third party context negates an argument for Fourth Amendment notice to the subscribers. I missed this because the reasoning closely resembles the argument for saying that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply at all, and I didn't read the earlier section closely enough. That's obviously a much narrower position, and I apologize for misunderstanding it the first time in the quick skim I gave it."

MULTIYEAR ARCTIC ICE VANISHES

I served a couple of years on an icebreaker in the 1960s. A detail left out is that fresher ice is easier to break through. As I recall the reason is a higher salt content. The salt slowly settles out. We were careful not to slam into the pretty blue ice. It could put a hole through out very thick hull. - John

HOW TO STOP USING SO MUCH TOILET PAPER

Yes, we use way too much toilet paper. One major factor could be the size of the average butt keeps growing but let's not go there. Instead let's save money and the Earth and be clean at the same time. Get serious and add bathroom bidet sprayers to all your bathrooms. I think Dr. Oz on Oprah said it best: "if you had pee or poop on your hand, you wouldn't wipe it off with paper, would you? You'd wash it off."�Don't worry, you can still leave some toilet paper out for guests and can even make it the soft stuff without feeling guilty.

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: TIME FOR A LITTLE MODERATION

That program makes such eminent good sense that I'm nearly dumbfounded that almost none of it appears on track to be enacted.

It's clear, coherent, practical, and fiscally responsible. In a word, moderate.

But I'm developing a distinct impression that for the Washington political establishment- the people who really run the country- the top priority is building permanent military garrisons in Central Asia and the Middle East.

This is plainly not what the electoral majority had in mind when the elected Barack Obama and gave Congressional majorities in both houses to the Democrats.

I can't say that I've ever seen the bait and switch game played so blatantly in American politics.

My patience with Obama is nearing an end. He started out with a clear majority of Americans supporting his administration. And nearly any effective executive can pick up another 5-10% of the American people simply by acting decisively and boldly.

A FINE ARGUMENT FOR DRUG LAW REFORM

I have doubts about the "legalize, then tax" argument for marijuana law reform. One of the reason illegal drugs are profitable is because of their black market nature. If pot were legalized, its price would drop, and governments probably wouldn't get the tax revenue they'd expect.

Furthermore, marijuana is relatively easy to grow on your own, so I'm not sure about the profitability of a legal pot industry. Granted, there are lots of people who might buy industrial marijuana for convenience, just like most people buy bread from a store instead of making their own. However, there could be money in the sale of newly legal equipment for pot use - vaporizers and so forth.

In short, I don't see legalizing marijuana as a way for governments to make money, although they would definitely save money by doing so. Still, it's amusing to imagine strolling down the bong aisle at Wal-Mart someday. - xilii

As the director of Novus Medical Detox Center, I have read many studies that say there is no long-term effect of using marijuana and many that said that there were. However, I do know that the common trait of people coming to Novus for detox is that almost all of them started smoking marijuana and many are still smoking it. - Steve

NORTH AMERICA'S LARGEST INDUSTRIAL UNION AND WORLD

This is exciting news, with lots of questions as well. Many developers in the US have attempted to copy Mondragon's success - just without co-operative ownership. Maybe MCC's involvement can change that.

Another exciting aspect of the Mondragon system that is often missed is the multi-stakeholder ownership structures of many of the co-ops. For example, Eroski, the second largest supermarket chain in Spain and member of MCC, is jointly owned and controlled by workers and consumers, many of the agricultural co-ops are joint worker and farmer co-ops, etc.

This is a real challenge to the US co-operative movement, which is largely based on the interest of one stakeholder group. MCC's example has the potential to resolve some of the conflicts that we have in our lives as workers and consumers.

Many have tried to bring Mondragon to America. Maybe Mondragon and the Steel Workers can get us a step closer. - Erbin

Wow! Just wow! The second step toward anarcho-syndicalist practice. With those two groups supplying the energy, I think we might be going to see something new under the sun. "When tyrants tremble, sick with fear And hear their death-knell ringing, When friends rejoice both far and near, How can I keep from singing?"

THE END OF POLITICS

You socialist idiot. It's thanks to imbeciles like you that we have the largest federal government/debt in the history of the human race. It's thanks to people like you that the US has over 70 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and the unsustainable, self-destructive welfare state that exists today. It's thanks to people like you that poverty and voter payout continue to persist. It's thanks to people like you that fairness and morality and justice are usurped for marxist centralization and coercion. You disgust me, you progressive, fascist, brown-shirt drone. FDR was a disgrace and a traitor to the constitution and the country.

TRADITIONAL NEW ENGLAND PREP SCHOOL TO DUMP ALL BOOKS

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness. - Holbrook Jackson

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. - Oscar Wilde

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. - Henry David Thoreau

My concern about all of this "electronic" text may seem a little 'Orwellian' to you, viz. just look how easy it is to change any text to conform to the current religico-political ideology/ I've read that during Soviet times, editors had to go back and change the text of hard copies to conform to the latest ideological Zeitgeist. With our 'e-publications' does this not make it so much easier to change history"? - Adolf

Rest assured that although Cushing has decided to take such an outrageous step, other elite preparatory schools are quite baffled by their decision and have no plans to follow. As a parent of a student at one of the most prestigious schools, I have seen nothing but astonishment and head shaking as we try to understand or grasp the motivation behind this. Most parents agree, as do many if not all students that I have talked with, that if this was a decision made at their own school they/we would seek admission elsewhere. I highly doubt that any other school will follow Cushing example. Maybe Cushing should replace all their teachers with online classes ?

OBAMA BACKS MAJOR RESTRICTIONS ON FREE SPEECH

This law would be a problem for the US. Freedom of religion does not take precedence over freedom of speech and does not include freedom from rational debate. Freedom of religion means you are free to practice whatever religion you like, privately, without having a state religion imposed on you. it does not include the right to impose your religion forcibly on others by passing laws to that effect. It does not mean that having a rational discussion about the relative merits of a religion can be made illegal by defining said discussion as blasphemy.

MASS MEDIA PIMPING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

I see nothing wrong with promoting the idea of national, state, or community service. As long as they don't make it a law, I see nothing wrong with the president promoting this idea. This is very similar to the freak out over Obama's speech to schoolchildren and his supposed desire to indoctrinate them! A little on the loopy side. Isn't there anything better to criticize?

SCALIA THINKS JEWS GET BURIED UNDER CROSSES

Being neither a Usanian nor a monotheist of any sort I think I am fairly neutral here. The US Constitution says only (Amendment I): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." You have to understand what "establishment" meant to your 18th-century forebears. The Church of England was the official religion in the country of the same name. One could not hold public office without being Anglican; the 26 senior Anglican bishops sat automatically in the legislature; the monarch had to be Anglican by law (and still does). That was "establishment" in the vocabulary of the American revolutionaries. Compared to that, the planting of the odd cross here and there is so trivial - and so irrelevant to the rights of free speech, free assembly, and security from unreasonable police action - that one has to wonder if the mass reaction against religious symbols isn't a way (engineered by some, unconscious in others) to avoid important issues. Why does a crucifix raise more protest than the tasering of harmless people? - Axel, Montreal

15 REASONS TO GET OUT OF VIETGHANISTAN

We are in Afghanistan to be militarily close to the Caspian basin to make sure the US gets its share of the oil there. We are not there to save the Afghani people or spread democracy or any other noble cause. Articles like this are really disinformation, since they give seem to give credence to our being there for noble, if misguided reasons. We are there for one primary reason. Oil. Secondarily, war makes some a handsome profit for a small connected few at the expense of the many. The fact that both civilians and our military get killed is not relevant to the decision makers.

WHY MURDOCH AND AP ARE FULL OF IT

My bet on what this is: Murdoch wants to take a marginal piece of Googles' ad revenue. It's flawed logic that the music industry works under (suing cover band or bars unlicensed to play music. Suing Girl Scouts for singing Happy Birthday) that there is no such thing as free promotion. Murdoch wants to capture some revenue most likely by lawsuit and his posturing in the media is intended to soften up the people who will consider his future case.

Resolution by law suit would be difficult. In most states people can travel over private land unless no trespassing signs are visible.

The robots.txt file is the net equivalent of a "no trespassing sign." Google and other search engines generally abide by this, so Murdoch and AP have no reasonable complaint. I suspect are unlikely to prevail in court, as their demands are counter to the prevailing practice and culture of the Web.

Let us not forget that AP tried to demand copyright payments for the use of any string of five or more words that were found in one of their stories. I believe that these novel demands are sheer extortion. AP would also have to pay for any string of five or more words that someone else had used. Because it is nearly impossible to write meaningful five word strings that no one else has used, AP would be required to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of others for a 500 word story.

The time required to research the owners of each five word string, and come to contractual agreement for use, would mean that no story could be published before it was ever so stale.

In my view such blatherings are nothing but corporate thugishness. The only chance that the complainers have is by buying legislators to create such law. - m

RECORD HIGH NUMBER OF FORECLOSURES

There are pickup trucks filled with evicted persons' appliances and household goods parked up and down my street. It seems the only form of employment these days is vulture. - St Louis Blues

11/01/2009 | Comments

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