Yesterday, I posted on the story that the Republican commissioners on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission bailed early to release a maddeningly stupid ‘report’ of their own that reiterated all of the non-sense bouncing around talk radio and Fox News, because I felt that it offers us a clear picture of how political power is constructed in early 21st America and how that construct intersects with concrete realities only in an accidental and ad hoc manner. Today, Barry Ritholtz demonstrates why this is important and offers ten questions for any thinking individual to consider in assessing the validity of the claims being made by these public intellectuals. I realize that it is easy to dismiss the whole affair as ‘more of the same’, but I would caution you against such a dismissive conclusion.

Across the political spectrum, the means of constructing an effective political bloc capable of achieving power is through the manipulation of language. Repeat the Big Lies enough and those lies develop what you could call ‘truth effects’ as in they create their own reality in which certain outcomes becomes pre-ordained. Whether its a ‘Fair Tax’ that would push the nation’s tax burden down the income ladder or labelling the few remaining institutions mandated with the task of protecting workers and senior citizens from wage slavery as being Ponzi schemes, it is through the manipulation of language and popular discourse that the Masters of the Universe wield their evil magic.

What sparked this particular rant…? The new Big Lie being propagated in the noise machine that public employees [aided by their evil unions] are better paid than their private sector counterparts is leaking into more mainstream outlets despite being almost total fantasy…

Using the latest federal data, Keefe said the average total compensation for workers in the private sector with bachelor’s degrees is $89,041 compared with $56,641 for public workers.

For workers with professional degrees — lawyers, say, or doctors — the gap is more dramatic: $175,141 in the private sector, $79,330 in the public.

Where public outdoes private is among workers without much education. The average compensation for a public worker without a high school diploma is $41,000, compared with $27,719. With diplomas, employees in both sectors make $44,000.

Public workers are more educated than private — 57 percent have college degrees and higher, compared with 44 percent. Because workers in all sectors are paid according to education and skill levels, lumping them all together — the least skilled with the most — is misleading.

While the middle and working classes continue their descent toward peonage, the nation’s wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated among the noble few, and any resistance to this dynamic is quickly labelled ‘class warfare‘ by the powers that be.

Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.

In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.

The key here is to remember that this long slide toward a Banana Republic is not something that is being done to us [the body politic] by evil Republicans or Democrats but is something that we are doing to ourselves. We internalize discourses that do not only bear little resemblance to reality but also undermine our own self-interests as citizens of the republic, and this is where education enters the picture. The reason the Masters of the Universe use the Big Lie and marketing techniques to achieve political ends is that it works. Only a well-educated populace capable of critical thinking and rational inquiry can immunize the republic from this growing kleptocracy, and it only takes a quick glance at education statistics to understand that we’re in deep trouble.

Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, says some of the public’s negative views come from frequent criticism from policymakers and in news reports.

“It’s become a throwaway line: ‘Oh, sure U.S. schools are lousy,’” said Cuban. “I think we have schizophrenia in the U.S. that we believe all U.S. schools are lousy except the schools we send our kids to.”

Thirty years of intensive marketing bank-rolled by the richest families in America has paid off in a general sense. Much like the denizens of the Scooter Store Revolution collecting government assistance while demonstrating against government assistance for an amorphous group of ‘others’ sucking on the entitlement tit, Americans are all for punishing lazy teachers working in predominantly urban areas far from their comfortable suburban oases but seem quite satisfied with their teachers and schools.

Second, while I can’t speak for big urban districts like Chicago and NYC, the whole issue is a bunch of horse manure. You show me a lazy, good-for-nothing teacher [and they're out there... I've worked with them] working in a school and I’ll show you an administrator who is failing to do his/her job. For the majority of school districts, there are procedures in place for getting rid of dead weight. What unions offer teachers is the right to due process and that is it. Living in the South I’ve witnessed many occasions in which due process saved teachers [usually biology teachers] from the pre-Enlightenment influence of local churches intent on ensuring children do not learn the basic knowledge informing many of the medical procedures keeping church elders alive to do God’s work.

Perhaps the most important take away from all of this is that the long term strategy of the elite in creating politicized think tanks, policy centers, and foundations to ’shape’ the body politic to their benefit are now reaping the rewards of their investments. The commonsensical ‘center’ of American politics has now shifted so far to the right that the public commons is now being offered up to the highest bidder in the name of liberty and equality.

If you want to understand where public education reform is heading, look south and east to Florida, where the governor-elect, Rick Scott, is talking about a new funding student formula that is more likely to destroy the public school system than accomplish anything else.

Scott wants to expand a voucher program that allows low-income and disabled students to use public money to go to private schools to ALL students…

Once upon a time in America, it may have sounded preposterous not only in concept but in chances of implementation.

But the Republicans in Florida, who just tightened their control in the state capital in the last election, are making in clear that they are determined to push for such a system in the state legislature next year.

There are legal, constitutional and other hurdles, but in today’s political and education atmosphere, no bad idea is impossible to implement.

That Rick Scott is a veteran of the largest Medicare fraud scheme in US history speaks volumes as to how dysfunctional our political system has become, but that he is now poised to set up yet another form of public looting in a legalized form should give everyone pause before blindly accepting the entreaties of public education reformers like Scott’s new useful tool Michelle Rhee.

Ultimately, the rot at the core of our political structure will break the American system that emerged from the upheavals of early 20th century, and this kleptocratic ’success’ is made possible by the common sense understandings that have been under construction for the past 3 decades. From Rush Limbaugh to the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post, the individuals who make up the American body politic have been conditioned to see themselves as atomistic entities who will achieve ‘liberty’ only through the rejection of social action and community.

Social Darwinism and the “life is like the jungle” attitude that are so pervasive in our society have a single purpose: to convince you that you are an antelope. The only thing you can do is run away. You’ll be OK so long as there are other people around who are even more vulnerable. You could try to stop them, but why? Every time they eat the poor, the geezers, and the kids who are defenseless, you live another day. Don’t try holding your ground against the big, strong predator. Don’t stick together or they’ll eat all of you.

Just imagine how much different our politics and society would be if we were less eager to say “As long as they’re eating someone else, I don’t care” and more apt to get in a big group and ask the lion if it feels lucky.

Steve Martin writes a book on art and is invited to participate in a book talk on the subject at a high-brow venue. Audience demands refund for not being funny.

If you think paying for a ticket entitles you to call the shots on how something clearly billed as a “lecture and conversation” is supposed to go, if you believe your entertainment should be as crowdsourced as Bristol Palin’s dance career, here’s the scoop: no. And to rudely demand otherwise is beyond wild. That’s downright crazy.

Economists remain immune from the immutable laws they hold so very dear…

Suppose that school teachers could keep teaching and get regular promotions year after year no matter how badly they performed in the classroom. Suppose also that there was no incentive to teach well. Economic theory predicts that we would get a large number of unmotivated mediocre teachers.

Okay, suppose that the people who design economic policy never need to worry about getting fired no matter how badly their policies turn out. They continue to hold their jobs and get regular promotions. Under such circumstances we should expect that we would get mediocre economists.

Banks and mortgage servicers remain immune from US law…

This is simultaneously laughable and damaging. The argument basically boils down to: “Gee, the fact that no one bothered to observe the contracts means they never intended to. So we’ll just pretend those provisions don’t count.” Does that mean that people who promptly went into default obviously never intended to pay, and should therefore get free houses? Or that when a borrower sends a payment a day or two late, they clearly intended to pay on time, so no late fees should apply? I think a lot of people would agree to that theory of contracts as long as it applied to consumers as well as banks.

CNN continues to circle the bowl…In this example, it is a Kindergarten-level report on federal debt that is factually incorrect.

This is what passes for mainstream journalism on this subject and it’s damned scary. But it is a good explanation as to why the country is contradictory and ignorant about the economy and the deficit. Remember, this isn’t FOX News, it’s CNN which is where the “independents” and many liberals get their news.

I remain convinced that one of the main causes of the systemic breakdown in our human organizing functions is the dumbing down of the media. When you listen to old broadcasts of journalists and politicians, they did not sound this stupid, not even the stupid ones.

Apparently, dirty hippies can open up sandwich shops in the nice part of town…

Pretty soon fans of Frussie’s Deli won’t have to cross the Henley Street bridge for their favorite sandwich.

Frussie’s plans to take up space, possibly as early as next week, at 17 Market Square, where Internet broadcasting company Knox ivi calls home.

I’ve taught at all levels of our education system, and the one thing that I’ve learned from those experiences is that even our so-called ‘good students’ are usually anything but… In the upper reaches of the academy, for example, the ‘good students’ that I’ve encountered are generally [but not always] the ones who know how to play the game, and their primary goal is to find out what the professor is looking for and provide it to him/her with as little effort as is possible. Despite all of the high and mighty rhetoric often thrown around about education, the pursuit of academic degrees is now almost totally subsumed beneath an instrumental logic that renders a good deal of what passes for schooling down to performance ritual.

This blast of cynicism was sparked by this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that details the confessions of an academic mercenary who writes papers for students at all levels and who spells out in not so subtle language that we are producing crop after crop of college graduates who cannot organize their thoughts into anything resembling coherence let alone write an academic paper. As a Sociology instructor, I am constantly faced with the question: Is it my job to not only teach my content area but to also teach the 100+ students I work with every semester how to organize and write a paper?

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

‘ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists…

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? [...]

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: “sending sorces for ur to use thanx.”

I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:

“did u get the sorce I send

please where you are now?

Desprit to pass spring projict”

Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.

The point of this long-winded rant is to introduce the only item that I read this morning that I think should be more widely disseminated. Love him or hate him, Matt Taibbi is perhaps the only journalist that has done due diligence in documenting the degree to which the financialization of the American economy is both a reflection of and determinant in the decline of a once promising nation into a bloated banana republic on the brink of collapse. The closing lines of his latest piece on foreclosure fraud sums up the large scale problems facing the nation across the board, and it is well worth your time.

Why don’t the banks want us to see the paperwork on all these mortgages? Because the documents represent a death sentence for them. According to the rules of the mortgage trusts, a lender like Bank of America, which controls all the Countrywide loans, is required by law to buy back from investors every faulty loan the crooks at Countrywide ever issued. Think about what that would do to Bank of America’s bottom line the next time you wonder why they’re trying so hard to rush these loans into someone else’s hands.

When you meet people who are losing their homes in this foreclosure crisis, they almost all have the same look of deep shame and anguish. Nowhere else on the planet is it such a crime to be down on your luck, even if you were put there by some of the world’s richest banks, which continue to rake in record profits purely because they got a big fat handout from the government. That’s why one banker CEO after another keeps going on TV to explain that despite their own deceptive loans and fraudulent paperwork, the real problem is these deadbeat homeowners who won’t pay their fucking bills. And that’s why most people in this country are so ready to buy that explanation. Because in America, it’s far more shameful to owe money than it is to steal it.

Today, we find ourselves being bombarded yet again with the discourse of crisis by a well-financed group of intrepid reformers pushing, this time, a corporatist agenda of quasi-privatization and high-stakes assessment. But what is the nature of this new “crisis”? And is it real or manufactured? I would argue that we are indeed in a period of crisis, but the nature of that crisis bears little resemblence to the discourse of “crisis” dominating today’s public debate. In fact, I’d argue that the real crisis facing public schooling is to be found in the purveyors of this new discourse of “crisis” and reform. I’ll be returning to the nature of this new era of “crisis” in the coming weeks, but I’d like to start off the conversation by pointing toward Tom Hoffman’s place. Look’s like Tom beat me to the punch, and he has done so in a thoughtful and concise manner…

Compared to other reasonably prosperous and developed countries on internationally administered tests, aggregate US results are middling. However, compared to other countries, the US primary and secondary education system is highly decentralized, segregated, inequitably funded and operates within the context of high and growing income inequality.

When individual states like Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire are compared to other countries, they rank near the top. To the extent that students in high income districts can be compared to other countries, they compare well, too.

While Singapore and Finland, exotic locales to most Americans, are the most cited examples of high performing countries, Canada is also consistently at the top. The most straightforward and accessible education reform lesson derived from international comparisons for Americans would be to become more like Canada.

There is not so much a crisis as a chronic problem of educating poor and minority youth in America, particularly concentrated in segregated schools. There is no existing model in the world for doing this right: nobody has overcome our level of income inequality, inadequate access to health care, high level of incarceration, etc. No other country of comparable wealth considers these conditions tolerable, no other country’s schools successfully dig a sub-set of their students out of such a deep hole.

Do read on…

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll be traveling this weekend… posting will resume on Monday!

The other point that I would make relates to the construction of political power. What you’re seeing here is a staggering degree of media penetration by individuals who have no special training or experience in education and schooling. Not only do they provide rich material for the blogosphere but these same individuals provide expert opinion for all manner of reporting on education policy across many platforms. In fact, that is one of the primary purposes of the modern think-tank! Think-tanks don’t “think”; they get the message out.

As for the Mead post… she’s building on Hess’ excretable post dismissing the Point study with a recommendation for more “standardized, reliable, and validated observational measures of teacher behavior”. I bet you can guess where that’s leading us. To be sure, this is the next battle to be fought in the war to relegate schooling to the cognitive basement.

The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way. Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

The Texas Board of Education, whose decisions can set textbook standards for the entire country, is now trying to take on the “Muslim propaganda” in world history books.

The social conservatives on the board, who earlier this year set new standards requiring textbooks to include sections on anti-Equal Rights Amendment crusader Phyllis Schafly, the Contract with America and the Christian beliefs of the Founders, want to pass a resolution warning textbook makers not to include “gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions” in their books.

According to board member Ken Mercer, many world history books are rife with such “Muslim propaganda.”

“One of the books I reviewed has 120 lines referencing Christian beliefs, but has 248 lines referencing Muslim beliefs,” Mercer told WOAI News Radio…

A draft of the resolution obtained by the Dallas Morning News reads, in part, that “diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions in social studies texts,” including “sanitized definitions of ‘jihad’ that exclude religious intolerance or military aggression against non-Muslims … which undergirds worldwide Muslim terrorism.” [...]

“More such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public school textbook oligopoly, as they are doing now,” it reads. As the Dallas Morning News pointed out, “They offered no specific evidence of such investments.”