Since it has become fashionable for the Faux News crowd to wail about the thuggery of our beleaguered unions, let us take a trip down memory lane to commemorate the Labor Day holiday: Alicublog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, in which Bolshevik operatives suicide-bombed first responders with their own bodies by hurling them out of the upper stories of a useful business owned by wealth producers Max Blanck and Isaac Harris. Some of the operatives set themselves on fire before attacking in an attempt to mask their intentions. Blanck’s and Harris’ worker-incentive program of blocking fire exits was blamed for the operatives’ deaths by the liberal media, as the Bolsheviks had planned.

The obstructionism of Republican senators is crippling all manner of government activity… including educational research: EdWeek

The National Board for Education Sciences, the advisory group which supervises the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences, has announced the agenda for its next meeting, Sept. 29. Now it has to hope members will be confirmed in time to show up.

Know Your Audience… Tuttle SVC

Your Audience is Skynet!

Imagine Inc. and the non-profit scam continues… Schools Matter

Is there an entity – not an Imagine-controlled LLC – that holds the charter and has the capacity to divorce itself from Imagine if it chose to do so? Or, is the governing body just an extension of Imagine, a lame-duck body acting on behalf of the company?

Rahmism… The Krug-Man

This theory led to a strategy of playing it safe: never put forward proposals that might fail to pass, avoid highlighting the philosophical differences between the parties. There was never an appreciation of the risks of having policies too weak to do the job.

How do libertarians propose to respond to the power of large enterprises?

Fiscal Austerity and Third World America… Baseline Scenario

The financial crisis may be behind us, but the link to the likely intense debate this fall regarding fiscal policy is direct — we are told that fiscal austerity requires outright and immediate further cuts in the benefits previously promised to people at the federal, state and local level.

Never mind that this is simply not true – at least in the form currently presented (here are a primer on short-term issues and another on the longer-term perspective). A vocal class of people –  including some at the upper end of the income distribution – incessantly insist that “entitlements must be cut” while refusing to address the real causes of both our recent surge in government debt (the financial crisis, caused by perverse incentives in the financial system) and the genuine longer-term issues we face (which are about controlling the future increase in health-care costs – not cutting the level of benefits today).

The self-described “fiscal conservatives” really cannot be taken seriously – in the financial reform debate, they either didn’t show up or preferred to keep the existing system in place, and they refuse to put serious health cost-control measures on the table…

[T]here is a striking similarity between the longstanding stated intention to “starve the beast” (meaning press for reduction in government by creating binding constraints, like a perceived crisis) and what we are seeing play out today.

Matt Taibbi examines the Tea Party… Rolling Stone

The Fox/Rush/Savage crowd in the last 18 months has taken the anti-Muslim fervor that launched a phony war in Iraq, carried George Bush to re-election, and pushed through the Patriot Act, and re-directed that anger at a domestic nonwhite enemy. In doing so they’ve achieved a perfect storm of political cross-purposes: they’ve almost completely succeeded in distracting the public from the real causes of their economic misfortune (i.e. Wall Street corruption), they’ve re-energized a Republican party that was devastated by eight years of Bush-era corruption and incompetence, and, as usual, they’ve made Rupert Murdoch a shitload of money.

Climate Change Turns 35… Real Climate

To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).

A profile of two of the most active members of the Billionaire Boys Club: the Koch brothers… New Yorker

[T]he advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Questions have been raised about some of the companies chasing the $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants to target the bottom 5 percent of America’s schools, and now Congress is jumping in the act.

As The New York Times pointed out in a recent story, some of the companies certified by states as school turnaround partners have no experience actually improving the fortunes of low-performing schools—or any school, for that matter.

Experimental Philosophy! In truth, the idea that philosophers are bound to their arm-chairs is a product of the 20th century and is an aberration in the history of philosophic thought… NYTimes

I think that what we are seeing now, with the surge of interest in experimental philosophy, is best understood as a return to a more traditional understanding of what philosophy is all about.

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame has been charged and cleared of rape chargers in less than 24 hours… AP

Swedish prosecutors withdrew an arrest warrant for the founder of WikiLeaks on Saturday, saying less than a day after the document was issued that it was based on an unfounded accusation of rape.

The accusation had been labeled a dirty trick by Julian Assange and his group, who are preparing to release a fresh batch of classified U.S. documents from the Afghan war.

On the bright side, Gerald Celente says we’re living in the midst of the Greatest Depression… Yahoo Tech-Ticker

The crux of the problem, Celente argues, is that the middle class has been wiped out. America used to be a land of opportunity for all, where hard-working people could build their own small businesses in their own communities and live prosperous and fulfilling lives. But now a collusion of state and corporate interests that Celente describes as “fascism” have conspired to help only the biggest companies and the richest Americans. This has put a shocking amount of the country’s wealth in the hands of a privileged few and left the rest of the country to subsist on chicken-feed wages and low job satisfaction as Wal-Mart “associates” — or worse.

You’ve got to be kidding me…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights — or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State — that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?

Yves Smith points us toward the ugliness that is Friday’s job report… Naked Capitalism

While the preparation of economic data is always a fraught business, one hopes that errors are more or less symmetrical, particularly in data series that (as is the case for some important metrics in the US, like GDP), are released on an initial basis (almost without exception the only one Mr. Market notices) and tidied up subsequently. It’s troubling when a statistical release shows a marked bias over time in corrections. It suggests at best a need for a change in methodology (something statisticians are reluctant to implement, since it means the series will not be strictly comparable over time) or at worst, political meddling (pressure to interpret legitimate ambiguities in the early findings so as to produce a prettier picture).

The Employment to Population Ratio is dismal… The Vantage Point

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics released new data today that shows the US employment to population ratio is continuing to plummet. As of July 2010, the employment to population ratio stood at 58.9%, down from 59.5% last month.

Income Inequality is equally dismal… Modeled Behavior

Its impressive that the income for the Top 1% races off while the income for the middle and lower class is squished towards the bottom.

Wyoming threatens to sell chuck of Grand Tetons to raise money for education… Guardian

Governor Dave Freudenthal is threatening to sell off a chunk of one of America’s most beautiful national parks unless the Obama administration comes up with more money to pay for education in the financially beleaguered state.

He says he will auction land valued at $125m (£80m) in the Grand Teton national park, one of the country’s most stunning wildernesses. Part of the park was donated by John Rockefeller Jr.

Other parts belong to the state government including two parcels of land of about 550 hectares (1,360 acres) designated as school trust lands to be “managed for maximum profit” to generate funds for education in Wyoming.

Man, do I need a vacation before classes start up or what? I’ll let George Carlin close this out with some parting wisdom about the state of the world…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jim Horn offers a scathing critique of Tennessee’s new academic standards… Schools Matter

What’s Missing from Common Core Standards… Washington Post

Test-publishing industry now defining “Best Practices”… EdWeek

Plagiarism in the internet age… NYT

The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers… NYT

Neo-Nazi Goes to Ulan Bator… Guardian

Defining Prosperity Down… Economist’s View

David Stockman [a lone voice from what used to be the sane wing of the Republican party] “How the GOP Destroyed the US Economy”… The Big Picture

The overall impact of IMPACT is not only unfair but not likely to do the job it is supposed to do: Root out bad teachers. Some great teachers are likely to be tossed out, and others, who know how to play along when the observers come in but don’t do much when they aren’t, could get a pass.

Of course, every school system should fire bad teachers. But they need a sophisticated and fair system to do that, and so far, D.C. doesn’t have one.

Bernie Sanders attempts to warn us that the trajectory the nation is currently traveling is un-sustainable…

Today, not content with huge tax breaks on their income; not content with massive corporate tax loopholes; not content with trade laws enabling them to outsource the jobs of millions of American workers to low-wage countries and not content with tax havens around the world, the ruling elite and their lobbyists are working feverishly to either eliminate the estate tax or substantially lower it. If they are successful at wiping out the estate tax, as they came close to doing in 2006 with every Republican but two voting to do, it would increase the national debt by over $1 trillion during a ten-year period. At a time when we already have a $13 trillion debt, enormous unmet needs and the highest level of wealth inequality in the industrialized world, it is simply obscene to provide more tax breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Jim Horn looks at Arne Duncan’s idea of equality…

If Arne Duncan’s views on equality are evidenced in his actions, it leaves us with a troubling realization.  For to understand that for Mr. Duncan to be right in saying that “education is the civil rights issue of this generation,” we must stand shamefaced in admitting that civil rights now demands from equality what we previously could expect only from oppression.

Glenn Greenwald asks why the Washington Post series on our ever-expanding, un-accountable surveillance structure has generated so little interest…

Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark?  They don’t.  Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government.  Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that.  It’s probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein — the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband’s investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) — to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series.  Despite Feinstein’s rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons…

The secret, omnipotent National Security State highlighted by The Washington Post will endure and expand as is because those who control the Government (or, as Dick Durbin put it, who “own” the Government) benefit endlessly from it.  Major scandals or citizen-infuriating crises can sometimes lead to some modest and easily circumvented restraints being placed on this power (as just happened with the recently enacted Financial Regulation bill), largely to placate public rage, but it’s simply impossible to conceive of the political class taking any meaningful steps to rein in a limitlessly powerful and unquantifiably profitable National Security and Surveillance State — at least in the absence of serious citizen revolts against it.  That Post series produced so little reaction because what it describes — a Secret Government bestowed with the most extreme powers yet accountable to nobody — is something to which the nation, as part of our State of Endless War, has apparently acquiesced as a permanent and tolerable condition.

Devo sums it all up for us… Being and breathing, pumping gas / Cheeseburger cheeseburger do it again

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grading Financial Reform: The Big Picture

Yves Smith wants to reclaim the word ‘Reform’: Naked Capitalism

The Republican strategy appears to be a cynical attempt to totally wreck what remains of the economy with the understanding that the majority will receive the blame: NYT

Beware of Terrorist Babies! Washington Monthly

Our Terrible News Media: Harpers

Our Terrible Health Care System:

You know its bad when business-friendly tool Arne Duncan supports cracking down on the predatory practices of for-profit colleges: EdWeek

Speaking of predation… Here is another industry in need of regulation: NYTimes

More trouble for Adrian Fenty… Will D.C. voters call the oligarchs bluff? Washington Post

“But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can’t take the cult out of the boy.” Or, how Alan Greenspan reaffirms his position as the most incompetent economist of his generation: The Big Picture

Take a peek behind the closed doors of Team Obama’s deficit reduction commission… Or, I sure hope grandma doesn’t mind cat food for dinner! Fire Dog Lake

Deficit Hawks love them some $80 billion in deficit spending if it benefits the children of the ultra-rich [the .02 percent of the population that pays the inheritance tax]: New Deal 2.0

Al Franken calls out the “strict constructionists” and “originalists” on the Supreme Court for what they are… Judicial Activists legislating from the bench: The Hill

De-Evolution: “Being Breathing Pumping Gas; Cheeseburger Cheeseburger Do It Again… It’s What We Do

Anne Geiger points us toward a moment of clarity over at the Wall Street Journal. Public Policy Blogger

WalMart teams up with online university… Our race to the bottom continues. NYT

3 Psychological Phases of a Bear Market. The Big Picture

Is the Billionaire Boys Club Good for Education? Answer: No. Economists View

The Revolving Door Defined. Public Citizen

One Big Mob. Aw yeah aw yeah.  YouTube