12.05.07
What workplace do you want?
And what workplace are you working toward? Paul Waldman:
These are not good times for American workers. Real wages are lower today than they were before the recession of 2001, and barely higher than they were thirty-five years ago. Health insurance is more expensive and harder to obtain than ever before. Manufacturing jobs continue to move overseas. The unions whose efforts might arrest these trends continue to struggle under a sustained assault that began when Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers in 1981, in effect declaring war on the labor movement.
This is a story with which you are probably familiar. But these are in no small part symptoms of a larger transformation of the relationship between employers and employees, in which Americans increasingly sign away their humanity when they sign an employment contract.
Let’s take just one component of today’s work environment that most people have simply come to accept:
Climate scientists: “Get working on global warming”
The AP reports that for the “first time, more than 200 of the world’s leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because ‘there is no time to lose.’” Last week, more than 150 global business leaders also released a petition demanding a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases.
Why design — Phillipe Starck
Legendary designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides behind him — spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized mantra for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush.
Interesting idea: lab notebook becomes blog
I like this approach. It occurs to me that it would work in other disciplines as well: putting one’s work out there for people (e.g., classmates) to see and comment on, and thus advance one’s learning
The economy and most of us
Robert Reich in American Prospect:
According to new polls, the economy is the number 1 issue for American voters. But that’s not just because the economy is slowing and mortgages are harder to come by. The real reason is middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they’ve used for over three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, adjusted for inflation. Male wages today are actually lower than they were then; the income of a young man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago.
The first coping mechanism was moving more women into paid work. The percent of working mothers with school-age children has almost doubled since 1970 — from 38 percent to about 70 percent. Some parents are now even doing 24-hour shifts, one on child duty while the other works. I call these families DINS - double income, no sex.
When families couldn’t paddle any harder, we started paddling longer. The typical American now works two weeks more each year than 30 years ago. Compared to any other advanced nation we’re veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.
More yet on fluoridation
Thanks to a commenter, the following article from a 1997 issue of a newsletter (PDF) from the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which I believe is a part of the CDC:
CDC Teams with Managed Care to Prevent Tooth Decay
By age 17, 84 percent of adolescents have experienced an average of 8 cavities. In 1995, nearly 6 percent, an estimated $45.8 billion, of all personal health expenditures were spent on dental services. A substantial proportion of these services are related to repairing teeth damaged by tooth decay. Although effective preventive regimens exist, access to clinical prevention care can be difficult for many population groups, especially those whose primary source of payment for dental services is out-of-pocket.
For more than 50 years, water containing fluoride at a level of 1 mg/L has been known to be highly effective in reducing tooth decay, whether or not one has access to dental care. “The estimated cost for water fluoridation during a person’s lifetime is equivalent to the cost of repairing one cavity, about $40. Yet, as of 1992, only 62 percent of those served by community water systems in the United States received water that provided optimal levels of fluoride. As the use of other fluoride products—toothpaste, rinses, tablets—has increased, many communities don’t feel the need to have
fluoride in their public water supply,” said Barbara F. Gooch, DMD, MPH, Dental Officer, Division of Oral Health.
How the WSJ thinks
A standard WSJ opinion piece that offers no evidence, ad hominem, poor reasoning, ignoring inconvenient facts, and so on:
The bar for Wall Street Journal editorials, in the journalistic equivalent of limbo dancing, keeps dropping. In a piece titled, “The Science of Gore’s Nobel” (subs. req’d), Holman W. Jenkins Jr. of the WSJ ed board, manages to slander the media, Al Gore, the Nobel Committee, and all climate scientists — without offering any facts to back up the attacks:
The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn’t for “science”…. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.
Why would the media blur the Nobel Peace Prize with a science prize when Gore isn’t a scientist? They wouldn’t, of course, but this imagined media blunder allows Jenkins — a journalist — to make the subject of his piece climate science.
What is especially bizarre about the WSJ piece is that Gore shared the Nobel Peace Price with thousands of scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — but Jenkins never mentions that fact at all. Again, that’s because he wants to attack the Nobel committee for “promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.”
In fact, the award was not given for promoting “belief” — a pejorative word as Jenkins uses it — but for promoting “knowledge” — as the Committee said, the award was given for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Business moves to control the Internet
I think we’ve seen several clear examples of how Business has no interest whatsoever in the common weal and in the public good, and how that Business doesn’t care what damage it does—socially, culturally, environmentally, economically—so long as it makes money. And now Business wants very much to get control of the Internet. And, of course, Business doesn’t hesitate to buy all the politicians that it can to get the legislation it wants.
Fascinating movie
20 minute story of where stuff comes from and where it goes. Absolutely fascinating. Also via Boing Boing.
Excellent article on excellent article
Jack Shafer has in Slate an excellent article on the Rolling Stones article “How America Lost the War on Drugs.” Shafter’s article starts:
If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells’ 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled “How America Lost the War on Drugs.”
Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I’ve read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, “a twelvefold increase since 1980,” Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it’s jailed, it’s still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations.
Wallace-Wells’ accomplishment, while formidable, didn’t require the back-channel confidential sources that Bob Woodward relies on or the mildewed library stacks of obscure documents that made up I.F. Stone’s arsenal. Wallace-Wells gets the story and gets it well by approaching the much pawed-over topic with an open mind and a smart set of questions. Like an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a Fortune 500 company, he asks what the government has gotten for the half-trillion dollars it has spent on the drug war and takes the question to the limits.
There is no reason that this project couldn’t have been conceived and executed by any newspaper in America. No reason except that too many editors, most of whom have indulged in illicit substances, fear the consequences of telling their readers the truth about drugs (canceled subscriptions, invective from Limbaugh and O’Reilly, loss of respect at the country club or university club).
ZENN car (zero emissions, no noise)
I want one. And there’s a dealer just up the road:
Pacific Coast
1266 Soquel Avenue.
Santa Cruz, CA 95062
Tel: 831-423-5820
Fax: (831) 423-2071
Website: www.pacificcoastvolvosantacruz.com
Kit Seelye, still at work for the GOP
Kit Seelye was one of the NY Times reporters who led the attack against Al Gore in the 2000 election, writing pieces that were slanted greatly in favor of the GOP. And now she’s at it again. Paul Krugman:
I have a lot of problems with this Kit Seelye piece. It’s kind of weird that the usual “both sides may have a point” reporting gave way to a clear declaration that one side is right — precisely on an issue where many, many health experts believe that Obama is wrong, and that mandates are both feasible and essential. Much better coverage of the issue, I’m sorry to say, in the Murdoch news.
But this takes the cake:
Joseph Antos, a health policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group.
Is it really possible for a veteran reporter to believe that AEI is nonpartisan? Not even a qualifier, like “right-leaning” or “free-market-oriented”?
A pattern of deceit
It looks very much as if President Bush learned of the findings in the new NIE report on Iran sometime between August 6 and August 9 of this year. Dan Froomkin summarizes a careful inspection of Bush’s statements and found that at that point he started being very careful to say nothing that explicitly contradicted the NIE report we have now, while still maintaining a sense of urgency to attack Iran.
Our “even-handed” administration of justice
“Black Americans are 10 times more likely to be imprisoned for illegal drug offenses than whites, even though both groups use and sell drugs at the same rate, according to a study released” by the Justice Policy Institute on Tuesday.
When you really want incompetence, you can get it
Government watchdog CREW today released a report, Homeland Security for Sale — DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement, “detailing massive failures and billions wasted at the Department of Homeland Security.” Some highlights:
– $24 billion has been spent, and at least $178 million wasted, on the failed Coast Guard Deepwater program;
– over $600 million has been allocated for unworkable radiation border scanners;
– $1.3 billion has been lost on the USVISIT program, which was never fully implemented; and
– projected $2 billion loss on the SBInet “virtual fence” border program.
More about the administration’s corporate cronyism HERE. And:
Wonder if the media will ask Huckabee…
About this, from Kevin Drum:
Are you familiar with the Wayne Dumond story? Here’s the nickel summary: Dumond was convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl in 1984 and was sentenced to life in prison. This was in Arkansas while Bill Clinton was governor, and for a while nobody cared. But then, after Clinton was elected president, Dumond became a cause celebre for the Clinton-hating fever swamp. (Book version of conspiracy theory here. There’s always a book.) Long story short, the rape victim was Clinton’s second cousin once removed, and the fever swamp became convinced that Dumond was the innocent victim of (yet another) frameup by a vengeful and drug-crazed Clinton. In 1996, after being elected with plenty of help from the fever swamp, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee announced that he thought Dumond should be set free. Subsequently, he met with the parole board and a few weeks after that Dumond was paroled.
Two years later Dumond was released from prison, and within weeks he sexually assaulted and murdered a 39-year-old woman in Kansas City. Huckabee was horrified, but said there was simply no way he could have known Dumond was dangerous. Today, Murray Waas says that’s not the case:
Confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again — and perhaps murder — if released.
In a letter that has never before been made public, one of Dumond’s victims warned: “I feel that if he is released it is only a matter of time before he commits another crime and fear that he will not leave a witness to testify against him the next time.” Before Dumond was granted parole at Huckabee’s urging, records show that Huckabee’s office received a copy of this letter from Arkansas’ parole board.
The woman later wrote directly to Huckabee about having been raped by Dumond. In a letter obtained by the Huffington Post, she said that Dumond had raped her while holding a butcher knife to her throat, and while her then-3-year-old daughter lay in bed next to her. Also included in the files sent to Huckabee’s office was a police report in which Dumond confessed to the rape. Dumond was not charged in that particular case because he later refused to sign the confession and because the woman was afraid to press charges.
Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in Arkansas. The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply troubled by Huckabee’s repeated claims that he had no reason to believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from prison.
Waas has more, including copies of the documents, over at the Huffington Post. The Dumond story is well known in Arkansas and never hurt Huckabee there. On the national stage, though, it might be a different story, especially in light of this new evidence. Huckabee’s got some ’splainin to do.
UPDATE: In other Huckabee news, apparently Huckabee was completely unaware of the new NIE on Iran two full days after it was released. Heckuva grasp on foreign policy, Huckie.
