Friday, September 30th, 2011
Stephan: I think we are headed for a period of social upheaval, like the Viet Nam era. The disconnect between the real situation in this country and the direction the Republican Party would like to go is not a sustainable tension -- something must change. It is not clear yet what the catalyst is going to be. It may be the spreading demonstrations related to the Wall Street sit-ins, it may be the spreading health care crisis, it may be growing unemployment, it may be the student loan bubble bursting, or it may be some event we don't even see on the horizon yet. Whatever it is I don't think it is going to be very long before it becomes evident in a major way. The social temperature is changing very quickly.
House Republicans on Thursday released their draft 2012 budget for labor, health and education programs, a giant $153.4 billion measure that moves toward the Democrats in total dollars but still challenges President Barack Obama almost across the board on labor rules and his prized education and healthcare reforms.
Total appropriations would fall $4 billion from 2011, but in line with the August budget accords, Republicans have agreed to restore at least $14.2 billion in additional reductions that had been called for by their budget resolution last April.
Public school Title 1 and special education assistance emerge with significant funding increases above 2011. The National Institutes of Health are promised a $1 billion increase in program activity and Head Start – once a target for the GOP – would get a $540 million increase, as requested by Obama.
Yet to keep the maximum annual Pell Grant at $5,550, the bill would institute tighter eligibility standards that could disqualify thousands of low-income college students. Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative would be wiped out entirely; deep cuts would be made in aid to Hispanic education institutions. And the bill seeks both to block the administration from proceeding with health care reforms and to rescind […]
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Friday, September 30th, 2011
MARIAN WANG, - ProPublica
Stephan: This is the truth behind the claim that regulation, particularly safety regulation, kills jobs. Like most Far Right claims about the negative effects of government, it is without merit.
It’s become a mantra on Capitol Hill and a rallying cry for industry groups: Get rid of the job-killing regulations. In recent days, with nearly every one of the GOP presidential candidates repeating that refrain, the political echo chamber has grown even louder. Earlier this month, President Obama also asked the Environmental Protection Agency to back off more stringent ozone regulations, citing the ‘importance of reducing regulatory burdens’ during trying economic times.
But is the claim that regulation kills jobs true?
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
‘The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,
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Friday, September 30th, 2011
DUNCAN GEERE, - WIRED (U.K.)
Stephan: Perhaps this is part of the reason conservatives feel committed to a fact-free world view.
A group of psychologists working at HP’s Social Computing Research Group has found that humans are more likely to change their minds when fewer, rather than more, people disagree with them.
wireduk
The team conducted an experiment asking several hundred people to choose between two pieces of furniture. After a varying amount of time, they were asked to choose again between the items, but told that a certain number of other people had preferred the opposite item.
The results showed that a small amount of social pressure to reverse an opinion was far more effective in getting people to change their minds than if the pressure was much greater. When an overwhelming number of people were shown as having made a different choice, people tended to stick with their original selections.
There are two conflicting theories of social influence at work here. Psychological reactance theory says that when we’re exposed to opposition to our beliefs, our self-preservation instincts kick in to make us stick to them. Social influence and conformity theory, however, suggests that being socially connected with others is important to humans, and we’ll reverse an opinion if we feel like it’ll let us ‘belong
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Friday, September 30th, 2011
Stephan: SR's cutting edge webmaster, Jeff Vander Clute, who keeps SR up and running -- not as easy a task as you might think -- tells me that it would be a very good thing if readers who have Facebook would click and say they 'like' SR. So would you please do this for me if, in fact, you do like SR. Apparently large numbers of 'likes' matter. Thanks.
-- Stephan
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Friday, September 30th, 2011
ERIC DASH, - The New York Times
Stephan: To understand what is going on in the United States, you really have to get it clear in your head that the uber-rich are operating on an entirely different playing field. Failure on that field means something quite different than it does to a middle class or poor person. This is all part of the trend of the great schism that is separating American into a series of hermetically compartmentalized subgroups. Even in the old Robber Baron days, it was not this bad. These people do not care about their workers and, in truth, they don't care about their shareholders either.
The golden goodbye has not gone away.
Just last week, Léo Apotheker was shown the door after a tumultuous 11-month run atop Hewlett-Packard. His reward? $13.2 million in cash and stock severance, in addition to a sign-on package worth about $10 million, according to a corporate filing on Thursday.
At the end of August, Robert P. Kelly was handed severance worth $17.2 million in cash and stock when he was ousted as chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon after clashing with board members and senior managers. A few days later, Carol A. Bartz took home nearly $10 million from Yahoo after being fired from the troubled search giant.
A hallmark of the gilded era of just a few short years ago, the eye-popping severance package continues to thrive in spite of the measures put in place in the wake of the financial crisis to crack down on excessive pay.
Critics have long complained about outsize compensation packages that dwarf ordinary workers’ paychecks, but they voice particular ire over pay-for-failure. Much of Wall Street and corporate America has shifted a bigger portion of pay into longer-term stock awards and established policies to claw back bonuses. And while fuller disclosure of exit packages several […]
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