Across the Great Divide

The Sweeper, the Boy and the Bike.

A different bicycle story, from China.

Cold Comfort.

I regularly pass through North Minneapolis on residential streets. Occasionally I'll read of a shooting that took place near a familiar route, but I'd never seen anything like this memorial at any of those locations.

On past rides, the weather was rainy or I didn't have the camera, but today I stopped and checked out the memorial. Two foil balloons now hang limply on the sidewalk side of the tree. A river rock at the base is engraved with the word Love. But there is no other indication of what happened on this street corner, so today I decided to search for a news story.

It is sadder than I expected.

We Need No More Evidence.

"ACORN could be eligible for as much as $10 billion in federal funds and that's simply unacceptable! We need no more evidence that the organization is either unable or unwilling to live up to the ethical standards that the American people demand."

– According to attorney and US Rep. Michele Bachmann

Here is a bulletin, Rep. Bachmann. You can edit videotape. You can delete material that doesn't support your story.  And when the editor is also the shooter and star of the show who happens to have an agenda, there's a wee possibility that the video is not an accurate representation of how the ACORN entrapment mission played out.

ACORN, at least in Minnesota, is hardly the powerful demon organization portrayed by the right. (When it isn't keeping appointments with junior ace reporters wearing gramma's fur coat, it's doing stuff like this.) It is not a complete paragon of virtue and non-profit effectiveness, but to claim ACORN is eligible for $10 billion in funding violates this American's ethical standard of speaking truthfully.

Dan Rather and CBS were disgraced over — though not necessarily wrong about — George W. Bush's National Guard Service because they didn't adequately vet some records used in their investigation. Of course, they couldn't, because originals had disappeared.

The ACORN videos don't remotely approach that standard of reporting. The crack journalists on the ACORN expose — a 25-year-old MBA student and the daughter of a right-wing radio personality — had far less supervision, a demonstrable bias and an expressed desire to bring down the organization. Yet their work is treated as conclusive evidence of corruption calling for immediate action by Congress.

Don't like the CBS/Bush comparison?

How about Blackwater?

Surely you remember the immediate action Congress took on an amendment to shut down funding for Blackwater after five Blackwater guards were charged with killing 14 Iraqi civilians. Don't 14 real dead people count as much for evidence as a dozen pretend illegal immigrants? 

Well, no. The ethically impaired but well-connected Blackwater, now calling itself Xe, is still working for the State Department.

Still no good?

Let's consider UBS, the Swiss-owned bank that has agreed to disclose information about the accounts of 4,450 wealthy American taxpayers — about 10% of its American clients. UBS didn't just provide some sketchy advice to a couple doofuses about their requirement to file tax returns. It actually solicited "wealth management" clients through its U.S. affiliates and helped them hide income to evade income taxes.

Its deal allows UBS to remain a "Qualified Intermediary,"  favorable treatment for a foreign bank in return for complying with certain reporting standards — the standards UBS violated. Congressional action against corrupt banks? I'll have to get back to you.

But for ACORN, an organization that serves low-income people, Rep. Bachmann and Congress have a different standard of evidence. All you need is surreptitious video starring Superflea and Bambi, and the howling jury represented by Strib commenters is ready to convict.

Nazi Party, SS, KGB, KKK, and now, ACORN.

For years, they've gotten away with murder.

If one isn't sickened and outraged over a group that was attempting to bring age 12-14 girls into this country for prostitition with our tax dollars, we have a very serious problem in this country. Acorn not only needs to be shut down, but there should be some long prison sentences for those involved.

How Do Communities Thrive: By Maximizing Wealth or Redistributing it?

The comments at This Road is Designed to Kill You have drifted a bit off topic — from the safety effects of traffic roundabouts to incentives for people to live closer to work to flight from city schools to the influence of school district size on student achievement. (Go ahead and read them if you haven't. I won't make many explicit references here.)

Running through the discussion is a divide that often surfaces here, and in fact simmers under most of what passes for debate in politics today. Whether the topic is health care, schools, the economy, taxes or infrastructure, it boils down to the merits of government intervention versus free market solutions as ways to solve big problems.

Another, less common way to put it is this: Communities thrive by redistributing wealth or by maximizing opportunities to accumulate wealth.

For example, Mark and Jeff had a back-and-forth over whether a single, large school district that allocated dollars first to lagging schools would help improve student performance, especially in inner city schools.

Mark says: "Turn all contiguous metropolitan areas into a single school district, with funding prioritized so as to deal with the lowest performing schools first."

Jeff responds: "The measure that shows the greatest correlation with school performance isn't funding, and it isn't class size. It's school district size. Kids in smaller school districts do far better."

Jeff is correct that studies show smaller school districts tend to have better student achievement, but size matters only insofar as it negatively affects the factors that really produce learning outcomes.

It's worth noting that school districts usually are large because a) they were formed to encompass large city boundaries with their diverse populations and the education challenges that go with them. Or b) they were consolidated from smaller districts experiencing enrollment declines, substandard offerings or funding issues that led them to seek economies of scale. In both cases, upsized districts are a consequence of factors other than pure pursuit of improved student achievement.

Mark is talking about disparity of income between districts, not size; a super district would be just one way to redistribute money to aid lower-performing schools. Of course, a similar move — giving more responsibility for school funding to the state — was tried and then has been slowly dismantled by Gov. Pawlenty. But redistributing school aid dollars isn't really the whole answer, either. Living in economically advantaged communities tends to be accompanied by other factors that relate to school performance, and these advantages are more difficult to export — or to benefit students who are bused in to those communities.

Growth & Justice delivered a research-based report last year that summarized three factors that were most critical for getting students from pre-K all the way through college. Each of these has financial implications, not necessarily tied to what we think of as "school funding."

Quality academic preparation and alignment. Children receiving sustained quality instruction, rigorous curriculum, and meaningful, ongoing assessments are more likely to succeed at the next education level.
Social supports. Relationships between children and adults in early childhood, school, and non-school settings are significant to academic success. Parents contribute to a child’s educational success when they are involved with care providers, teachers, mentors, and tutors.
Access and financial support. Access to quality providers, programs, and institutions places children and students in a position to take advantage of learning opportunities. But limited financial means can be a barrier to access. Subsidized childcare, preschool, and post-secondary tuition grants expand access to quality learning experiences for students at all income levels.

To over-simplify my point, I'd say the education discussion drifted toward comfortable positions for Mark and Jeff, but got richer as they shared the research and the complexities became more evident.

In another post, I'll discuss one other angle their discussion raised — taking personal credit for successes and blaming government for failures.

For the Poor, a Bike Can Mean Opportunity and Risk.

For a lot of low-income workers, biking is not a hobby.

In Texas, a drunk driver hits a cyclist and throws him in the car — not to take him to a hospital, but to clean up the scene of the crime. The victim was a local handyman who did not live independently.

An Arizona man vaporizes a cyclist with his speeding BWM, then turns it in to Cash for Clunkers. The cyclist was riding in a bike lane, with a light and flashing rear light. He worked as a security guard at a Safeway and, according to his roommate, he often had to ride his bike the 21 miles to his Phoenix home because the bus stopped running from the north suburban location in Cave Creek.

Drivers may rail about racers in spandex and bike messengers who ride aggressively in city traffic, but a disproportionate number of bike-car fatalities involve poor working stiffs making their way from their cheap housing to low-paying service jobs located in areas not well-served by public transit.

Riding a bike connects them to employment at odd hours, but also puts them at risk with drunks and bad guys.

via Jonathan Turley [h/t Mark Gisleson]

The Real Reason to Invest in Newspapers.

Question: Why aren't these money-losing conservative-owned publications — Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, Richard Mellon Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Philip Anschutz's The Weekly Standard, and Sun Myung Moon's spectacular money pit, The Washington Times — on the list of newspapers facing impending bankruptcy or closure?

Answer: "They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there."

This is not exactly news, of course. But the main part of Thom Hartman's piece describes the nature of the rich man's tax con job in simple terms:

"You Americans are such suckers," he said, as I recall. "You think that the rules for taxes that apply to rich people also apply to working people. But they don't. When working peoples' taxes go up, their pay goes up. When their taxes go down, their pay goes down. It may take a year or two or three to all even out, but it always works this way - look at any country in Europe. And it's the opposite of how it works for rich people!"

...

[W]e have to help Americans realize that "no new taxes" is a mantra that is meaningful to the very rich, but largely irrelevant to average working people.

Only when the current generation re-learns the economic and tax lessons well known by the generation (now dying off) that came of age in the 30s through the 60s, will this become politically possible. Americans need to learn what Europeans know about taxes - they only matter to the rich.

Friend of the Debt Collectors Comes Under Fire.

The Minnesota attorney general's office filed suit yesterday against National Arbitration Forum, saying the company violated state consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices and false advertising laws.

[Attorney General Lori] Swanson said that credit card companies, banks, retail lenders and cell phone companies increasingly place mandatory arbitration clauses in the fine print of their consumer agreements. [Note: So do securities dealers.] The consumer agrees -- often without realizing it -- to have any dispute resolved by an arbitrator chosen by the credit card company or another creditor, waiving the right to have it heard in a court of law.

In bringing together consumers and creditors to settle credit-card debts, the company purports to be independent, but the AG's office says National Arbitration Forum has hidden its ties to debt-collection law firms.

In a separate lawsuit, the city of San Francisco said the company arbitrators ruled in favor of consumers in just 30 of 18,075 credit-card cases over a four-year period.

That's the way it works all over. Poor and debt-strapped people pay higher interest rates and are nicked constantly by fees and charges, while I earn miles and get a free float each month. We both deserve what we get, right?

And if you think that's not fair, just ask my friends here.

When I heard about the suit yesterday, two conservative political affiliations immediately came to mind. One was Minnesota First Lady Mary Pawlenty, who, to her credit, quit after a month, declaring the job not to be a good fit.

The other, which was not reported, was between Edward C. Anderson, managing director and chief executive officer of the National Arbitration Forum, and Mitch Pearlstein's Center of the American Experiment. Anderson sits on the conservative think tank's Board of Directors.

In March, CAE sponsored a symposium entitled, "How Can Conservatism Better Allay the Economic Fears of Working-Class and Middle-Class Americans?" [PDF]

The only advice on this topic I could glean is that low-income people should manage their money more like I do.

The New Retirement: Work Until You Win the Lottery.

A guy works for the same company for 26 years, likes his job and company and finally achieves the American Dream.

Now he can stop working three jobs to support his family.

Clyde Persley [that's his 1977 high school yearbook picture] won $39 million in a California lottery. But the kicker is that he worked part-time as a limo driver and was on-call at Santa Cruz restaurant, while also working full-time for a company operating candy-making machines.

Here's the quote that really stuck with me:

"I really appreciate my life with Harmony Foods," he said of his 26-year stint there. "I can't say enough how much my work has meant to me."

His story started me digging for statistics about the underemployed. How many Americans work multiple jobs just to stay afloat — because of low wages, inadequate hours, seasonal employment or lack of health care coverage? How many good workers hover near the poverty line and never work their way out?

But stories of real people, not numbers, are what brought the issue home for me.

Nearly a decade ago a researcher studied how rural Utah families met their family's needs despite low-paying work:

Jill, a single mother with four children, is a good example of multiple job holding.

At one time I was working four jobs. It was when I was first divorced ... about four years ago. I was working for the bank in town ... thirty five hours a week. And then because ... I have problems getting child support, I was working also in the evenings about three or four days a week ... for a convenience store for minimum wage. I was doing typing for an insurance agent. I was doing his billing and his correspondence at home on my computer and then on weekends I cleaned house for people.

That year, she told me, she "made $9,000 total," several thousand dollars below the poverty threshold for her family; thus, while working four jobs, she qualified for AFDC. After a spell on AFDC, she wasn't eligible for Medicaid without a spend down or for Food Stamps because of her vehicle, and was uninsured for several years as a result. Two of her children have chronic medical conditions for which they need prescription medication, but health insurance through her job at the bank would have cost her over $200 per month and "we needed that money to live on." Food was watched carefully during that time: "we had a gallon of milk ... this has got to last all week, kids. I was really thankful that my kids could get like free lunches at school and free breakfast. So they could go to school and eat and then they'd get a good lunch and we'd work out dinner."

Jill was able to keep up that schedule for about two years because her oldest daughter assumed many responsibilities at home, including meal preparation and child care. But the strategy of multiple job holding exacted some heavy costs on the family. "I was really lucky because my oldest daughter was very, very responsible and one of the reasons I quit was because ... we still needed the money, but my daughter's grades were dropping in school because she was spending so much time helping" with the younger children. Jill quit the job at the convenience store in order to stay home in the evenings with the children. In addition to the effects on her daughter, Jill found those years took a toll on her, as well. "It was really hard emotionally. I really think I aged a lot in two years ... just worrying. The stress of trying to carry on four jobs, make ends meet, you know, wondering how we were going to pay the next bill.... So I had no choice." During the years of multiple job holding, Jill also availed herself of some church-based assistance, mostly for groceries. In her case, low wage work meant she "balanced" her budget by devoting more time to paid employment, depending on family-provided child care, using local resources for groceries, and foregoing health insurance.

Clyde Persley says "I can't say enough how much my work has meant to me" and he seems to be a pretty centered guy. Yet his secure future is a matter of pure luck.

UPDATE: Bob Herbert talks about today's job prospects of the underemployed, and they're not as good as when Clyde graduated from high school.

Could the Nanny State Actually Make Us Safer on the Roads?

The World Health Organization has published a study that found traffic accidents were the 10th-leading cause of death in the world in 2004 — and were growing at a rate that would place road deaths 5th by 2030.

But that's not even the surprising part. 

Pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcycle riders accounted for 46 percent of all worldwide traffic deaths. Most of these deaths occur in low- and moderate-income countries, where automobile registrations are much lower than in developed countries, but the rate of deaths as a percent of the population is higher. Low-income countries, including most of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, have only 9 percent of the world's cars but almost 42 percent of the traffic deaths. 

In the U.S. [Download PDF], 24 percent of deaths involve vulnerable road users — 2 percent of fatalities involve cyclists; pedestrians and riders of 2- and 3-wheel motorized vehicles account for 11 percent each. In Thailand [Download PDF], the figure is 81 percent — cyclist fatalities are 3 percent, but the 2- and 3-wheel motorized vehicles account for 70 percent of road deaths. That's about equal with the proportion of registered motor vehicles of that type (63 percent).

In the U.S., 32 percent of road traffic deaths involve alcohol; in Thailand, only 4 percent.

I haven't studied the data enough to have any brilliant insights here. But it looks like one factor in the differences between high-income and low-income countries could be the "nanny state" — which provides has stringent safety and licensing laws, greater enforcement, safer public transportation, better infrastructure and quality emergency care.

The Real Reason Why Cuts are Better Than Tax Increases.

Minnesota House Tax Committee Chair Ann Lenczewski is not only one of the state's smartest people on taxes, she has a great way of explaining things. Here's a quote from her videotaped testimony on balancing the budget.

Why a mix of taxes and cuts? You can absolutely target tax increases on the poor. You can absolutely target tax increases on the middle class and on the rich. It's pretty darn hard to cut the rich.

Cuts fall overwhelmingly on the poorest Minnesotans.

(via MN Progressive Project)