Tag Archives: school

Corporate Lobbyists Outspend the Rest of us 34 to 1

by JerilynPrell Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lee Drutman looks at the real problem with lobbying in the American political system:

Looking at lobbying in the aggregate, what jumps out is the stark imbalance in resources. Corporations blow everyone else out of the water. Business accounts for roughly 80 percent of all reported lobbying expenditures, about $2.6 billion dollars a year now.

….Meanwhile, the types of organized interests who we might expect to provide a countervailing force to business — labor unions, groups representing diffuse public like consumers or taxpayers — spend $1 for every $34 businesses spend on lobbying, by my count. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying annually, consistently 95 represent business. In interviewing 60 corporate lobbyists for my book The Business of America is Lobbying, I asked them to identify the leading opposition on an issue on which they were currently working. Not a single lobbyist volunteered a union or a “public interest” group.

….This growing imbalance has had two major effects on the political system. First, it is increasingly difficult to challenge any existing policy that benefits politically active corporations….Second, the sheer amount of lobbying has created a policymaking environment that now requires significant resources to get anything done. Which means that, with increasingly rare exceptions, the only possible policy changes on economic policy issues are those changes that at least some large corporations support.

Lobbying is inevitable. You might even say that it’s nothing more than politics in its purest form. But if that’s true, American politics has become almost purely a game played by big corporations and their allies. The rest of us—which is to say, practically all of us—are left with nearly no say in what happens.

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Corporate Lobbyists Outspend the Rest of us 34 to 1

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Republican Judges Set to Rule on Republican Objection to New EPA Regs

by LavadaZPHbc Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Things that make you go “hmmm”:

Environmental attorneys say they are confident the court will reject the emergency appeal.

Nevertheless Thursday’s hearing, before three Republican-appointed judges, marks the first of what promises to be a series of legal hurdles for climate-change rules.

The subject is Obama’s new rules mandating greenhouse gas reductions from power plants, which energy industry attorneys say is “double regulation” since the EPA already regulates other stuff at power plants. No, that doesn’t make much sense to me either. Still, the two bolded phrases above might have been believeable together a few decades ago, but not so much now. If it’s a Republican panel, I think there’s at least a decent chance that we’ll get a Republican ruling, regardless of whether it makes any legal sense.

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Republican Judges Set to Rule on Republican Objection to New EPA Regs

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

by CarltonDecosta Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just published a deep look into the World Bank’s track record of ensuring that the projects it sponsors don’t end up harming local communities.

Since 2004, more than 3.4 million people have been economically or physically displaced by Bank projects, according to the report’s analysis of the lender’s data. And while the Bank has policies requiring it to reestablish and resettle such communities, the ICIJ’s investigation found that they were falling short, operating under a troubling lack of safeguards, through bank officials too willing to ignore abuses committed by local partners, and with an institutional culture that values closing big deals over following up on human rights.

After being presented with the ICIJ’s findings, the bank quickly promised reforms. But one part of the investigation contains this interesting passage, which suggests an unexpected reason the Bank may not be able to clean up its act: competition has gotten too stiff.

As it enters its eighth decade, the World Bank faces an identity crisis.

It is no longer the only lender willing to venture into struggling nations and finance huge projects. It is being challenged by new competition from other development banks that don’t have the same social standards—and are rapidly drawing support from the World Bank’s traditional backers.

China has launched a new development bank and persuaded Britain, Germany and other American allies to join, despite open U.S. opposition.

These geopolitical shifts have fueled doubts about whether the World Bank still has the clout—or the desire—to impose strong protections for people living in the way of development.

United Nations human rights officials have written World Bank President Kim to say they’re concerned that the growing ability of borrowers to access other financing has spurred the bank to join a “race to the bottom” and push its standards for protecting people even lower.

Today’s package of stories, published with the Huffington Post, is the first installment of a series reported in 14 countries by over 50 journalists. More than 20 news organizations were involved in the effort.

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

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Senate’s Iran Bill Probably Not a Bad Idea After All

by CathleeWRR Posted on April 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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President Obama has said that he’s willing to sign the latest Senate version of a bill that gives Congress a say in any nuclear deal with Iran. I’m glad to hear to that because, oddly enough, I’m pretty much in favor of the current bill. Here’s why:

Congress should be involved in major arms treaties, regardless of whether my preferred party happens to control Congress.
The current bill requires Congress to vote on a final deal within 30 days. No one expects a treaty to get implemented any sooner than that anyway, so it’s not much of a roadblock.
If Congress disapproves the deal, the president can issue a veto. It would then take two-thirds of the Senate to override the veto and kill the treaty.

I don’t see much of a downside to this. If Obama can’t get even one-third of the Senate to go along with his Iran deal, then it probably doesn’t deserve to be approved. And the threat of a suspicious and recalcitrant Congress going over the treaty language word by word might actually motivate Iran to agree to more straightforward language in the final document. It certainly shouldn’t doom the negotiations or anything like that.

A lot of this is political theater, and a lot of it is pure Israel-lobby muscle at work. Still, I suspect it does little harm and might even do a little good. And setting out the parameters of the Senate vote beforehand is probably all for the good. This isn’t a bad bill.

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Senate’s Iran Bill Probably Not a Bad Idea After All

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Worst. Logo. Ever.

by SelmaMccombs Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

I’ve kept my distance from the nearly insane volume of reaction to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement this weekend, including the tens of thousands of turgid words deconstructing her allegedly revolutionary announcement video. (Please.) It’s a routine announcement, folks. We all knew it was coming. We all knew approximately what she’d say.

What’s more, I nearly always stay out of discussions about logos. I have no artistic sense, so who am I to judge? And yet….holy cow. I have to go along with the nearly unanimous stunned reaction to Hillary’s campaign logo. It’s hideous on so many levels it’s hard to even marshal my thoughts about it. Seriously, WTF were they thinking?

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Worst. Logo. Ever.

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No, the Poor Are Not Squandering Public Money on Filet Mignon

by NadineRosenthal Posted on April 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Are the poor blowing their food stamps in wild bacchanalias of filet mignon and lobster thermidor? Is this something that we ought to keep a closer look on as protectors of the public purse?

You can probably figure out the answer already, but, um, no. Here are some relevant monthly figures for food spending among the poor, as collected by the Consumer Expenditure Survey:

Meat and fish: $48
Fruits and vegetables: $42
Alcohol: $15

Pretty obviously, there’s a lot more baloney and chicken breasts here than steak and lobster. And this doesn’t change a lot as you move up the income scale. The numbers above are for the poorest tenth of consumers, but they stay about the same even when you move slightly up the income ladder. The entire poorest third spends only about $323 total on food per month.

Should we encourage better nutrition and better food choices among the poor? Less McDonald’s and more broccoli? For all sorts of reasons, of course we should. But should we be worried that public money is being squandered on prime rib or fresh Pacific swordfish? Nope. There’s just no evidence that it’s happening except as the occasional scary anecdote. It’s a non-problem.

Max Ehrenfreund has more details here if you want some comparisons between rich and poor in various categories of consumer expenditures.

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No, the Poor Are Not Squandering Public Money on Filet Mignon

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

by ValorieSilver Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back when Egypt started bombing Libya and Saudi Arabia started bombing Yemen, American conservatives were jubilant. That’s the kind of swift, decisive action Barack Obama ought to be taking against our enemies in the Mideast. Never mind that this already was the kind of action he had taken. It didn’t really count because he had been too slow to ramp up attacks and had demonstrated too little bloodthirstiness in his announcements. Did he really want to “destroy” ISIS or merely “degrade” it? Dammit man, make up your mind!

This weekend, though, the LA Times reminded us that regardless of who’s doing it, air strikes alone simply have a limited effectiveness in wars like this:

Officials in Saudi Arabia, the region’s Sunni Muslim power, say the air campaign is dealing a decisive blow against the Houthis, whom they view as tools of aggression used by Shiite Muslim-led Iran in an expanding proxy war….However, residents say the strikes have done little to reverse the territorial gains of the insurgents and restore exiled President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi to power in the quickly fragmenting country.

….Security experts question whether the coalition can achieve its goals through airstrikes alone. Saudi officials have not ruled out sending in tanks, artillery and other ground forces massed along the frontier. But Saudi leaders appear wary of such a move against the Houthis, hardened guerrillas who belong to an offshoot of Shiite Islam known as Zaidism.

The last time the Saudis fought the Houthis in the rugged mountains of northern Yemen, in 2009, more than 100 of their men were killed. Pakistan’s parliament voted Friday to stay out of the conflict, a blow to the Saudis, who had reportedly asked the country to send troops, fighter jets and warships.

“This war will turn Yemen into Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam,” said Mohammed al-Kibsi, a veteran journalist and commentator in Yemen’s capital, Sana, where the Houthis seized control in September.

Air strikes are useful components of a wider war. But to the extent anyone can truly win these conflicts in the first place, it’s going to take ground troops. Lots and lots of well-trained, well-equipped, and well-motivated ground troops. Saudi Arabia is “wary” of committing ground troops in Yemen and Pakistan is staying out. In Iraq, it’s still a big question whether the Iraqi army is up to the task. And to state the obvious, even among America’s most bellicose hawks, there’s no real appetite for sending in US ground troops.1

This is just the way it is, and everyone knows it. Air strikes can do a bit of damage here and there, and they can serve as symbolic demonstrations of will. But none of these conflicts—not in Yemen, not in Iraq, not in Syria, and not in Libya—are going to be affected much by air campaigns alone. They need ground troops. If you loudly insist that Obama is a weakling as commander-in-chief but you’re not willing to commit to that, you’re just playing political games.

1And don’t fall for the “special ops” ploy. Politicians who want to sound tough but don’t want ruin their careers by suggesting we deploy a hundred thousand troops in Iraq again, are fond of suggesting that we just need a bit of targeted help on the ground from special ops. This is clueless nonsense meant to con the rubes, but nothing more.

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Saudi Arabia’s Shiny New Air Campaign Not Working Any Better Than Anyone Else’s

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Why Do Progressive States Have Regressive Tax Codes?

by LettiePulido Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A lot of people think the federal tax code should be more progressive, but it looks downright socialist compared to the typical state tax code. A chart released last week by Citizens for Tax Justice puts it in context, showing how the wealthy typically pay lower state tax rates:

Citizens for Tax Justice

This problem isn’t limited to conservative states: According to a recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), every state places a higher effective tax rate on the poor than it does on the rich. In fact, several of the nation’s most politically progressive states count among the worst when it comes to shoveling the tax burden onto low-income people and the middle class.

The nation’s most regressive tax code belongs to Washington, a state that was ranked by The Hill last year as the bluest in the country based on its voting patterns and Democratic dominance. The poorest 20 percent of Washingtonians pay an effective state tax rate of 16.8 percent, while the wealthiest 1 percent effectively pay just 2.4 percent of their income in taxes.

There’s a clear explanation for that: Washington has no income tax and thus heavily relies on a sales tax that disproportionately affects the poor. What’s harder to grasp is why Washington’s liberals put up with it.

Structural conditions help explain why regressive taxes endure in Washington and many other states. Some states require supermajorities to raise taxes or have constitutions that mandate a flat tax. In Washington’s case, voters approved a personal income tax in 1932 by a two to one margin but were overruled the following year by the state Supreme Court, which decided that a constitutionally mandated 1 percent cap on property taxes also applied to income. An income tax bill passed by the state legislature a few years later was likewise struck down.

But the courts, weirdly, are no longer the biggest obstacle to a fairer tax code in Washington; over the years, they’ve gradually overturned most of the legal precedents that had been used to invalidate an income tax, and most experts believe such a tax would become law today if passed. The bigger problem is voters. In 2010, Washingtonians rejected by a whopping 30-point margin a proposal to establish an income tax that would only have applied to people earning more than $200,000 a year.

How do you square this with California, where, just two years later, a similar tax hike on the wealthy easily sailed through? Or with Oregon, Washington’s political cousin, which has long had a progressive income tax?

I asked John Burbank, the executive director of the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute and an architect of Washington’s failed 2010 income tax measure, why he thought the measure had failed to pass. At first, he cited the off-year election and opposition scare tactics. But when pressed, he offered a third explanation that I think makes more sense: “There is almost like a cultural prohibition that exists.”

In other words people, liberal or conservative, who live in states with low or no income taxes get used to paying little. They may differ on protecting the environment, legalizing weed, or raising the minimum wage, but when you start to mess with the system on which they’ve built their personal finances, they get scared and balk. This is why changing the tax code is so hard, even in states where people may in their hearts believe it’s the right thing to do.

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Why Do Progressive States Have Regressive Tax Codes?

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We’ve Been Asking Mexico to Detain Migrant Kids for Us. Here’s What That Looks Like.

by SteffenRoepke Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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A new report by the Georgetown Law School’s Human Rights Institute found that Central American child migrants apprehended in southern Mexico over the past year have faced excessive stints in detention, often in poor conditions, deterring them from seeking asylum abroad.

The study, released Monday, concluded that Mexican immigration officials have failed to adequately screen children for international protection needs and did not inform them of their right to apply for asylum. “Unfortunately, the reality for most migrant children apprehended by immigration authorities in Mexico is characterized by the violation, rather than the protection, of human rights,” the report concludes.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

The group of Georgetown researchers interviewed 65 accompanied and unaccompanied children, parents, government officials, aid workers, and people in the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula and Guatemala City.

As Mother Jones has reported extensively over the past two years, a recent rise in gang and gender-based violence, along with economic hardship at home, has prompted children and families to flee Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). While the number of kids crossing the US-Mexico border alone shot up to 68,541 in fiscal year 2014, estimates show that US Customs and Border Protection will apprehend only 37,000 child migrants in fiscal 2015. Some experts have suggested that the decrease can be attributed to stepped-up enforcement in Mexico, taxing an already flawed system of immigration detention there.

Here’s what else the report found:

Child migrants were kept at Mexico’s immigration stations and shelters in Tapachula for “long, unpredictable periods of times,” even though Mexican law requires unaccompanied children to be immediately transferred to federal, state, or local shelters. Of the 6,718 children detained at Tapachula’s notorious Siglo XXI detention center in 2013, 1,121 children were held there for between 15 days and 300 days. Just 422, or 6 percent, were placed in local shelters.
A psychologist who worked with child migrants at a city shelter said that their extended detention at a local shelter made them “apprehensive” about applying for international protection. “Very few children request asylum,” she told researchers. “What scares them is the prospect of being detained for three months.”
Poor conditions at Siglo XXI also deterred migrants from seeking asylum. Once families are detained, members are separated by age; many detainees reported that the gang presence they’d fled had followed them to the center. As one 15-year-old boy said: “It’s an awful place. People are crammed, it’s very hot, the food is terrible, and it’s dangerous for us teenagers because they put us together with maras Central American gangs.”
Researchers also noted that Mexican immigration officials who are legally bound to screen children for asylum and other forms of deportation relief failed to inform them that they had a right to international protection. None of the children the research team interviewed at Siglo XXI was informed by child protection officers or other immigration officials about the right to seek asylum.
Few migrants who applied for international protection in Mexico received it, according to the country’s Commission for the Assistance of Refugees. Of the 1,165 cases decided between January and September 2014, only 247 were recognized, despite the fact that the commission received 17 percent more applications for asylum in the first eight months of 2014 than in all of 2013.

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We’ve Been Asking Mexico to Detain Migrant Kids for Us. Here’s What That Looks Like.

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Kids Who Have to Share iPads Learn Better Than Kids Who Have Their Own

by SteffenLindrum Posted on April 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Students who share digital devices do better academically than their peers who have their own devices or no devices at all, a team from Northwestern University has found.

The study, conducted by communications Ph.D. candidate Courtney Blackwell, focused on three Chicago-area elementary schools. One school had iPads for each of its 100 kindergartners, another had roughly one iPad for every five students, and a third had no iPads at all. Blackwell found that the kindergartners who shared iPads scored 28 percent higher on a standardized literacy test at the end of the year compared to the beginning. Kids who had their own devices improved their scores by 24 percent, and those who had no devices at all increased their scores by 20 percent. Though the differences seem small, they are statistically significant, according to Blackwell.

Blackwell attributes the success of the sharing group to “the collaborative learning around the technology.” As an example, she pointed to an activity where students were instructed to find various shapes (squares, rectangles, circles, etc.) in their classroom and report their findings using their device’s microphone and recorder function. “In the shared classroom, two kids would share an iPad so there was much more talk and negotiation,” Blackwell told me. “If one kid pointed and said, ‘I found a square,’ another kid may say, ‘Oh, well that’s not a square—it’s a rectangle.'”

That collaboration enhances learning may seem obvious. But the implications of the study—that students don’t need their own digital devices—could be far-reaching, especially as many districts make major sacrifices in order to be able to afford technology. Take for example, North Carolina’s Mooresville Graded School District, which in 2009 decided to cut 65 staff members, including 37 teachers, in order to buy laptops for all of its students. (While the New York Times reported three years later that the district’s test scores had improved, it attributed the success to other factors as well.)

Probably the most infamous example of the intertwined relationship between tech and tests is the bungled Los Angeles Unified Schools District iPad initiative, which included a $1.3 billion contract with Apple and the testing and curriculum company Pearson. In the 2013-14 school year, the district, which is the second largest in the nation, began rolling out the program, which would outfit its 64,000 students with their own iPads. The effort was quickly deemed a failure—not only were there a lack of basic accessories like keyboards, but students were hacking their iPad security settings to they could spend class time scoping out Facebook and other off-limit sites. By the following summer, the district’s contract with Apple was annulled. Then, last October, the superintendent resigned amid rumors—which the FBI is currently investigating—that he and other administrators had connections with both Apple and Pearson that may have influenced the contract.

While Blackwell’s findings—that kids learn better when they engage with one another—aren’t earth shattering, they do serve as a reminder of the influence that the $7.9 billion educational technology sector holds over schools. It’s not clear yet whether the one-device-per-student approach is in the best interest of kids—or just the companies that make the devices and supply their content.

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Kids Who Have to Share iPads Learn Better Than Kids Who Have Their Own

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