Pundita

Strategic defaulting or 'voluntary foreclosure' is where homeowners who can afford the mortgage walk away from it because they figure it doesn't pay to keep up the payments on a house that's fallen considerably in value. I've heard before about the phenomenon, which has mushroomed during the recession. But the reporter who wrote the following article for USA TODAY marshals facts about the trend that, to my mind, point to a larger issue.

One of the biggest problems found in third world countries is that the people have so little trust in the government and the economic structures that they fear making long-term investments. That hampers economic development so there's a vicious cycle in effect: the more the people cling to very short-term investing, the harder it is for capitalist measures to take effect, leading to the continuation of a moribund economy, thus further entrenching bad socialist-style government policies, thus leading to more mistrust of the government.

The ease with which many millions of Americans are taking up strategic defaulting, which wrecks their credit rating, suggests a breakdown of respect, and lack of trust, for economic structures in this country, including the credit and banking systems.

Is this trend simply a byproduct of hard times, something that will pass when the economy improves? Or does it indicate that the cumulative effect of financial scandals over the past decade has altered the American social fabric?

I don't know. I do know that short-term thinking in financial areas shouldn't belong in a first world nation and that if it continues in this one, it will lead to the same vicious cycle found in countries with chronic poverty.

The USA report, which I republish below, contains a number of hyperlinks and an interactive map of U.S. foreclosures state-by-state; see the USA TODAY website to access these.

More walk away from homes, mortgages

By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY, November 2, 2009

When Sharon Sakson was laid off recently from her job as a television writer and producer, she burned through her savings to pay the $2,400 monthly mortgage on her home. But she soon decided it didn't make sense: Her home was worth thousands less than the mortgage she carried on it.

The home had been appraised at $390,000 when she refinanced in 2006, but she estimates it's not worth the $320,000 it initially cost in 2004. So Sakson did what a growing number of homeowners are doing today: She stopped paying and decided to let the bank take her home.

"I'm walking away from my house," says Sakson, 57, who stopped making payments about six months ago on her home in Pennington, N.J. "The bank can have it."

What Sakson did is called a strategic default, or a voluntary foreclosure, and it's fast becoming a major challenge to the government's $75 billion effort to keep distressed borrowers in their homes. Walking away from a mortgage is serious business — it can knock 100 points off your credit score and make you ineligible for a new mortgage for seven years. Yet, about 588,000 borrowers walked away from homes last year, double the number in 2007, according to a recent study by credit-scoring firm Experian and management consultants Oliver Wyman.

While home prices are rising, the increases pale compared with overall drops in home prices since 2005 that threaten to push millions more homeowners into Sakson's predicament, owing more than their homes are worth and seeing little chance of rebuilding equity soon.

More will walk away, which will hamper the housing recovery, reinforce lenders' tight credit policies and drag on the economy's recovery, economists say.

"It's increasingly a more important factor driving the foreclosure crisis," says Mark Zandi, of Moody's Economy.com. "As we move forward, the job market will stabilize, and the big thing will be strategic defaults. People are going to determine it doesn't make financial sense to hold on to their homes. That's going to be a significant problem. Strategic defaults mean foreclosures could be high for a long time."

It's not just economists who are concerned about strategic defaults.

The mortgage unit of Citigroup says one in five borrowers who defaults does so willingly, even though they're able to pay the mortgage. "It's a very large number, and it's a very, very significant risk to the housing recovery," says Sanjiv Das, CEO of CitiMortgage, adding that new government programs to curb strategic defaults may be needed.

Waiting for prices to stabilize

How bad the strategic defaults issue gets may depend on how much more home prices fall and whether the government does more to help homeowners with mortgages larger than their homes' value. Both Zandi and Das suggest further actions to reduce mortgage principal for underwater borrowers.

"A better way to do it may be an incentive to stay current for a period, and after two years of being current, they get a principal reduction," says Das.

Under the government's Making Homes Affordable Program, borrowers are ineligible for refinancings if their unpaid mortgages are more than 125% of the home's market value. Loan modifications under the program do not have any loan-to-value limits.

Nationally, median prices have fallen about 25% from their peak in late 2005, although prices recently have risen compared with prior months this year. The median price in the second quarter — $170,000 — was at roughly the level it was in autumn 2003.

But price declines have been worse in some markets. A closely watched barometer of home prices, the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Index, shows they have fallen more than 25% in 12 markets and more than 50% in two — Phoenix and Las Vegas — from peaks hit in 2006 or 2007.

Fifteen out of the 20 metro areas saw a rise in prices from July to August, but those increases are not anywhere close to the losses that have already occurred.

The number of borrowers who walk away is expected to increase, along with the rise in homeowners who owe more than their homes are worth. An unprecedented 16 million homeowners currently are underwater, according to Moody's Economy.com. That's about a third of all homeowners with a first mortgage.

Moody's Economy.com estimates the number of underwater borrowers will peak at 17.4 million in the third quarter of 2010.

An even higher estimate comes from Deutsche Bank, which predicted in an August study that the number of homeowners underwater will grow from 14 million (or 27% of all homeowners with mortgages) in 2009 to 25 million homeowners, or 48% of all those with a mortgage, by the time home prices stabilize.

Not coincidentally, strategic defaults have been highest where prices have plunged most, such as California and Florida.

From 2005 to 2008, the number of strategic defaulters went up by 68 times in California, according to the Experian-Oliver Wyman study published in September. During that same time period, the median price for existing, single-family homes in California fell from $522,670 in 2005 to $346,410, according to the California Association of Realtors.

In other geographic regions, the increase in strategic defaulters ranged between 3 times and 18 times more.

The Experian-Wyman study found borrowers with higher credit scores when they applied for their loan were 50% more likely than other types of borrowers to walk away from a mortgage only because they were underwater, even though they could afford to pay. The study was based on an analysis of about 12 million borrowers.

No household would default if the equity shortfall is less than 10% of the value of the house, according to another study this year, done by the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the European University Institute. But 17% of households would default, even if they could afford to pay their mortgage, when the equity shortfall reaches 50% of the value of their house. That means the market value of a mortgage property is that much below the amount of loan taken against it.

There also appears to be a contagion effect. Borrowers who know someone who defaulted are 82% more likely to declare their intention to do so.

Growing acceptance

"The most disturbing aspect of this is that it's becoming acceptable to do," says Joel Naroff, an economist with Naroff Economic Advisors. "What does that mean down the road for housing and the economy if people are happy to walk away and destroy their credit? They're saying, 'Why pay a high amount if they can get something, even a rental, for less?' "

Because of the time and expense involved in completing a foreclosure, borrowers who decide to walk away often wind up staying in their homes for months after they stop paying their mortgage.

In most states, lenders can go after homeowners for past-due payments, but many fail to take such action when borrowers abandon their properties, because the legal costs are so high.

Short sales, in which lenders agree to the sale of a home for less than the balance of the mortgage, is an alternative to a strategic default. Many lenders are now encouraging them, but Zandi says that alternative may seem too time-consuming for borrowers who want to quickly get out from under their homes.

Janet Speer, 51, isn't happy to be walking away from her 200-year-old home in Royersford, Pa., but she doesn't feel ashamed. Speer says she was paying about $1,400 a month for her home, which was appraised at about $155,000.

After getting laid off last year, Speer said, she tried to modify her mortgage to more affordable terms but was denied because her unemployment benefits and alimony didn't count as income. Speer stopped paying on her mortgage in September 2008.

She is still living in the home and waiting to be foreclosed upon. Speer is saving her unemployment benefits for an apartment once the bank takes over her home.

"I got letters and calls from the bank at first, but they stopped," said Speer, who now earns commission income from a job in the health care industry. "I have a three-story house. It's way too big. I just want a little two-bedroom apartment. I don't want this place anymore. I would never have chosen to do this, but it's going to work out."

I think I told readers the story years ago -- how, as a small child accompanying my mother on her frequent visits to Mexico, I began to ask questions about the contrast I noted there between the most awful poverty and the great wealth in the country. Once, after seeing a church with a large amount of gold statuary, I asked why the church didn't give the gold to the poor. When I didn't receive a clear answer I announced that I would never again visit Mexico, and I never did.

In the decades since, after I learned that the United States government, with the full backing of the American people, supported the Mexican regime and ruling class that condemned millions of Mexicans to poverty and apartheid, I became philosophical. I had crossed paths with so much evil by then that even dogs and small children, who'd loved to be around me in my youth, instinctively backed away. At least Mexico's government didn't practice population control by routinely rounding up tens of thousands of teenage males, shipping them to a plantation, and slaughtering them. Americans wanted Mexico's oil and Mexico's cheap labor; if that meant looking the other way while their government propped up Mexico's oligarchs, crueler things happen in this world.

But I underestimated the stupidity of Mexico's ruling class and the Americans who supported the government-sponsored industrialization of remittance payments. Thus, March 2005 found me shouting a warning in a post titled Why Vicente Fox is going straight to hell:

Western governments are studiously blind to the connection between diaspora remittances, narco states, terrorism, and the plight of the world's poorest. The US State Department (and the Bush administration) crowed about an initiative under the US-Mexico partnership, which makes it cheaper for poor Mexican immigrants working in this country to send remittances back home. Why don't they just line up Mexico's poor and shoot them? Oh but that's right, Pundita forgot! If you shoot them, you can't bleed them dry.

In time with the streamlining of remittance transactions, Mexico's government had started an official program to encourage Mexicans working in the United States to send remittance payments. This allowed Mexico's oligarchs to continue staving off paying taxes. But the bulk of the remittances was being used by Mexican recipients just to put food on their table.

I had warned readers in late 2004 that America was on shaky ground economically and that hard times were inevitable and not far off. In a series of posts in 2005 that followed my frantic warning about remittances, I asked what would happen to Mexicans who depended on remittances for basic necessities if there was a severe economic downturn in the United States.

The answer exploded in headlines in 2009, as Mexico became engulfed in the worst gang violence in memory and the country became a major hub for human trafficking. What didn't make headlines was the rise of private militias in the country, the growing presence of Hezbollah operatives there, and the hint that drug gangs were borrowing tactics from the Naxals.

But as the gang wars spilled over into the US border regions Americans asked, 'Where did all this violence come from?'

Well, humans don't take to starvation if they can find a way to avoid it -- a lesson not learned by the American government in Iraq. In the wake of a severe recession in the USA, which laid off hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrant workers or severely curtailed their work hours, remittances dried up. The upshot was that Mexico descended into something like Iraq's post-invasion phase, which saw thousands of unemployed Iraqi men keeping their families from starvation by setting IEDs, at $50 at pop, for al Qaeda and the Baathist insurgents.

In the same manner, as America's recession settled in, many starving Mexicans who could no longer depend on remittances gave up their law-abiding ways; they joined drug gangs and started new gangs, which launched turf wars that were so horrific the Mexican military had to be called up.

What was the response from the USA? The government tossed a few billion dollars into the bottomless pit of Mexico's corrupt government and offered to loan a few billion more so Mexico's military could purchase a couple Blackhawk helicopters. And self-styled human rights activists, and politicians backed by agribusiness, redoubled their efforts to advocate for illegal Mexican immigrants and immigration reform that would provide amnesty for all illegal immigrants in the United States.

This fall, the activists turned their sights on CNN and CNN's advertisers, in the effort to have Lou Dobbs removed from the cable channel. They accused CNN of hypocrisy for reaching out to the 'Latino' community while at the same time airing Dobbs's program, which they accused of promoting hatred against Latinos and Latino immigrants.

Roberto Lovato, a founding member of a Latino activist organization called Presente helped put together an online campaign called Basta Dobbs! ("Enough Dobbs!") that drew scores of activist organizations calling for Dobbs's removal from CNN. In a September 24 column for The Huffington Post, Lovato wrote:

[J]ust as Dobbs is free to gin up anti-immigrant sentiment, we are free to educate our community about his impact, call out his pattern of fear mongering and faulty reporting.

And that is exactly what Latinos and our allies are doing. The BastaDobbs.com campaign is bringing together groups and individuals organized in the 25 U.S. cities with the largest Latino populations to show Dobbs for what he is: the Most Dangerous Man for Latinos in America. We are exercising our free speech rights to demand that CNN live up to its claim to be "most trusted name in news."[...]

The Basta Dobbs! website features a list of organizations that have rallied to the cause. Thinking back I can't remember any names on the list that received publicity for protests against the American government's decades of complicity in the rape of Mexico's poor. Nor do I recall any of those names, or Mr Lovato's name, associated with protests against Mexico's government.

Indeed, thinking back over decades, I can't recall any march on Washington, any U.S. labor union rallies, any pickets in this country, about the actions of Mexico's government toward their nation's poor and the country's indigenous population, which is not Latino.

If anyone can find even one article published by any of the organizations listed at the Basta Dobbs site that takes Mexico's government to task for their treatment of Mexico's poor, or which points out that the government has been getting away with murder by encouraging Mexico's poorest to immigrate to the USA, please send it to me.

And if anyone can find an article written by an American or 'Latin-American' activist that excoriates American agribusiness, and all American employers of Mexican immigrants, for their hypocrisy and complicity in propping up Mexico's oligarchs, please send it.

I could continue in this vein but let's cut the crap. Hell will freeze over before you see any American politician or Latino activist group in the USA decrying the need for Mexicans to find work in the USA.

If the activists want to accuse CNN of hypocrisy, why don't they ask the company's executives if they'd produce a series on corruption in Mexico's government and apartheid in southern Mexico -- where the indigenous population can't even walk on the same sidewalk as the descendents of the 'Latino' Conquistadors? Oh but that's right I forgot; executives at CNN International, and their sponsors, would have a heart attack if an American TV news organization embarrassed Mexico's rulers.

In this world the big fish eat the little fish, so I understand that Americans who demand cheap labor don't care that they profit from the misfortunes of Mexico's poor. I even understand that they want to slap a fig leaf on their greed by lobbying for better treatment of Mexican immigrants.

What I don't understand is why 'Latin American' activists have never followed in the footsteps of the refugees from Soviet oppression, who once landing on these shores gave the U.S. government no peace until the Soviet Union fell.

For any twelve-year olds who've wandered into the discussion, South Africa wasn't providing the USA with oil and neither was it providing Americans with a limitless supply of dirt cheap labor. That's why it was politically correct for America's human rights activists to protest apartheid thousands of miles away but to say not a word about what was happening next door.

As for Lou Dobbs -- I don't watch his show enough to know whether he needs better fact-checkers but from what I've seen, his show is the only regular source on news from Mexico for American audiences; it's not much news, and it's all unpleasant news from what I saw, but it's more than all the other US networks combined produce about Mexico.

Why is that? Why do American news broadcasters have such a hard time finding Mexico on a map? Could it be that talking too much about Mexico will bring forward the question of why so many Mexicans flee here, despite Mexico's oil wealth? And why so many Americans continue to avoid learning the detailed answer?

And could that be the problem, do you think, for Lou Dobbs? Again, I haven't seen the show much -- only a handful of times this year. So perhaps a reader who tunes in daily could let me know whether he presented any reports earlier this year that would have given Mexico's oligarchs or the Mexican government a hissy fit. Or if he presented so much coverage on violence in Mexico that this would have bothered the U.S. Department of State and Homeland Security.

If the latter is the case, I'd suggest to State and Homeland that they start facing reality about Mexico, then communicate the truth to the Obama administration and Congress.

It's going to take more than a fleet of Blackhawk helicopters to put down a Naxalite-style rebellion if it gets underway in Mexico; if you won't take it from me, take it from the Indian government or Shlok Vaidya.

I think Shloky, who keeps a close eye on the Naxals, would surmise that their tactics are cycling into Mexico's drug gangs through the gangs' contact with drug-dealing Muslim terrorist/insurgency organizations working in Mexico.

In any case: for now, the Mexican gangs are about profit. Tomorrow might not be the same story.

At one point President Bush told Vicente Fox, while Fox was Mexico's President, that he needed to raise taxes on Mexico's rich. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who claimed the last presidential election was stolen from him, said it wasn't necessary to raise taxes, just get the rich to pay them.

López Obrador doesn't want Mexicans immigrating to the USA to find work; he considers that a national humiliation and an indictment of Mexico's ruling class. Part of his political platform was to get Mexico's rich to pay up on their taxes and from that create jobs so Mexico's poorest didn't have to find work in the USA. For that kind of talk the US government branded him a dangerous, unhinged communist demagogue.

And no matter how hard I try, I cannot recall any Latin-American activists, or any American activists at all, rising up to argue with that view of López Obrador.
****************
This entry is cross-posted at RBO; the painting Brenda chose to accompany it says it all, so I am adding it here. The painting is by Francisco Bollaín y Goitia García (1882-1960): In Goitia’s later life, he worked as a professor at The Academy of San Carlos and studied indigenous groups of Mexico.

American parents saving for their children's college education will have blood shooting out of their eyes, to steal a phrase from Glenn Beck, by the time they finish reading the discussion from the October 31 airing of Paul Gigot's "Journal Editorial Report" on Fox News Cable. The panel, led by Paul Gigot, examines the reasons for the skyrocketing cost of a college education in the USA.

At the end of this post is the portion of the transcript for the broadcast that deals with the topic. But in brief, the discussion brought out that colleges have learned they can charge whatever the traffic will bear for tuition, even during a deep recession, because they know the government will keep increasing financial aid for low income students. As long as the aid spigot is turned on for the poor, the colleges can get away with gouging middle income families because those are the ones that traditionally put up and shut up.

This means middle income parents who're trying to get their children through four years of college are beaten up twice: first, by an industry that functions much like a cartel by raising their varying tuition prices in concert, then by taxation going toward college aid for which the middle class doesn't qualify.

The upshot is that the college cartel bleeds middle income parents dry, keeps their children in debt for years after graduation, and inexorably drives the USA toward fully socialized higher education.

Is there any way to break up the cartel? Yes, but it would take a revolt against the university system, which started out as benign and progressed to a tyranny that is wholly supported by society's inertia, in the manner of the factory in George Lucas's THX-1138.

The system that leads to a college degree was supposed to support higher education but once the degree became the only sure ticket to a decent wage, non-college/university routes to education became neglected. The more the cycle progressed, the more power the universities gathered -- until they reached the point (which came about a quarter century ago) where they could make life hard for companies that wanted to hire workers straight from high school graduation; the universities accused the companies of trying to start a guild system and even accused them of promoting indentured servitude.

The only indentured servitude going on that I can see is graduating students who received aid having to work off their debt at a government-chosen job, or having to direct a chunk of their income for more than a decade to paying off crushing debt with high interest accrued from other types of student loans.

One of the panelists on the "Journal" show, after noting it can now cost $200,000 to get a bachelor's degree, suggested that parents write a check to their children instead of the college.

That's a great idea. Let the most mature high school graduates invest the money earmarked for their college education while they work as interns learning the field or trade that interests them, or invest the money in starting a business. This is the perfect time in American history for high school graduates who want to start a business; that's because there's a huge and diverse knowledge pool among retired Baby Boomers, who can advise high school graduates about starting and managing a business.

The same solution can be applied to some extent in the scientific/engineering fields.

All this would return universities to what they were conceived for, which is to be a place of study for those wishing to be scholars in a subject. At the least it would thin the forest of students who are only attending college because they need a degree in order to compete in the workplace.

There are other less radical ideas for breaking up the cartel, or at least putting a crimp in it, such as placing more emphasis on online universities; that would be also be another way to thin the forest. One of the most surprising revelations from the "Journal" show is that studies have shown that the lifetime earnings for a graduate of a top-ranked university such as Harvard are about the same as for someone who attended college at say, the University of Arkansas.

Yet I believe we're overdue for a revolt against attitudes that have made the university system the key route to a good job in the USA. Speaking of Glenn Beck, he began working full time on the weekends as a disk jockey when he was a junior in high school. After graduation he went straight into a job at a radio station. Except for brief times between jobs he has been working since then in radio, until he added his own business, a television show, and book writing to his radio career.

One may argue that Glenn was lucky to find the vocation he loved while he was so young. The other side of the argument is that his work in radio at a young age spared him the social pressures of the college scene, which can divert huge amounts of a youth's energy and attention from finding and focusing on his 'passion.'

That is not true in all cases, of course, but I think many college-age people are not suited by temperament to spending years in an academic setting.

Glenn has spoken of his ADHD as being a significant factor in his emotional problems and earlier substance abuse. Yet his ADHD did not prevent him from being a highly productive tax-paying member of society from an early age.

Glenn's ADHD has also been blamed for his inability to take a course at an Ivy League university that Joe Lieberman arranged for him years ago. But Glenn gobbles up books; he's always studying -- an amazing achievement for someone with his heavy work load. Maybe he wasn't always such a bookworm but his Fox audience knows he's a prolific reader who shares with the audience what he learns from his studies.

There are people who have great difficulty studying unless they can immediately apply what they learn. The university system can be very rough on such people.

And, more darkly, I suspect that many children who're tagged with ADHD or as chronic problem students or poor learners are those who tend to feel like the protagonist in THX-1138 when forced to spend hours a day sitting in class.

I'm not calling for a repeal of child labor laws. But Saturday's discussion on the "Journal" show indicates we're at a point where the high cost of a college education should spur alternatives that are acceptable credentials in the work world.

There is one other feature of college life that has become very problematical, as more and more Americans have been put through the system: whether the setting is an Ivy League university or a small community college the routines are virtually the same. This has led to echo-chamber thinking, to a sameness of approaches to problem-solving.

There's an old saying in the USA, born of the days of door-to-door salesmen: The louder the Bible-thumper the more closely you have to watch your wallet. In the same manner today's American university, which preaches the most loudly about the need diversity in school admissions and curricula, tolerates no diversity when it comes to alternatives to the college system of preparing children for a career.

Journal Editorial Report October 31, 2009; excerpted from the 'rush' transcript:

"PAUL GIGOT: It's a trend that most parents are keeping an anxious eye on, the skyrocketing cost of a college education. According to a new report by the College Board, those costs continued to rise last year despite a 2.1 percent decline in the consumer price index. Hit hard by state budget cuts, four-year public colleges raised tuition and fees by an average of 6.5 percent while prices at private colleges rose 4.4 percent. Add room and board and the average cost of attendance at a public four-year college is now more than $15,000 a year. At private colleges, the price tag is $35,000.

The sticker shock has led some, including Tennessee Senator and former education secretary, Lamar Alexander, to push for a three-year degree program at the college level.

We're back with Dan Henninger and Steve Moore. And also joining us, the Wall Street's deputy Taste Page editor, Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Why do cost levels rise even if the price doesn't for everyone else?

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY, DEPUTY TASTE PAGE EDITOR: It's a third-party payer system. Basically, what you have is colleges know they can keep raising the price and they know that the government, through financial aid programs and various grants that they give to universities both public and private, is basically going to pick up the difference. Unfortunately, for middle class parents, it doesn't always work out that way. They're not picking up all the difference for them, but colleges keep raising the sticker price.

GIGOT: Because there's income limits on who gets the subsidies, but the subsidies are vast and the Pell Grants, direct grants for people. They're based with these subsidized loans and then there are subsidies for savings for school too, which is how a lot of middle class parents get help. Are you saying there's a kind of chasing-your-tail quality here? The tuition goes up, subsidies follow and then the people say, tuition can go up again, and then subsidies have to go up again?

SCHAEFER RILEY: That's true. In addition, you also get an arms race among the colleges. I mean, you get a situation where, first of all, it turns out that parents think the college is better if they raise the price. So if you see a $50,000 cost on college tuition, which by the way, happened this year --

GIGOT: Where is that?

SCHAEFER RILEY: Middlebury College. It costs $50,000 for tuition, room and board.

GIGOT: In Vermont.

SCHAEFER RILEY: Yes, this year. Vermont, a very high-cost-of-living state.

(LAUGHTER)

[...] But parents see that sticker price and assume that must be a great college education. So it's — all the wrong incentives are in place and colleges are spending money on things like landscaping and fancy food programs and Wi-Fi in the bathrooms.

(LAUGHTER)

SCHAEFER RILEY: It's really hard to figure out where the quality is.

GIGOT: I have a hard time imagining. I barely use a P.C., Dan.

DAN HENNINGER: It's going to get worse. The College Board just reported private loans last year for college dropped by 50 percent while the public federally subsidized loans rose 15 percent. Now, we also know that the Congress has taken — is going to disadvantage the private loan program, which means that the federal program is...

GIGOT: They're going to put it out of business.

(LAUGHTER)

HENNINGER: They're going to put it out of business, right, which means that basically colleges are going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government. You'll never get countervailing price pressure under those circumstances.

GIGOT: Steve, is this going to lead to you wanting to send your kids to college for only three years?

STEVE MOORE: Well, you know, Paul, I have an 18 and 16-year-old.

(LAUGHTER)

I'm listening to these prices that Naomi is talking about and I'm going to need a big fat pay raise.

(LAUGHTER)

My kids are going to be with me another four years, which is a nightmare.

Look, this is a real issue. It's going to cost now $200,000 to put a kid through college. You have to start asking yourself the question: Look, I'll give you a $200,000 check. Maybe that's a better way to start your life than going to college. But Naomi put her finger on the problem. The two areas — I was looking at inflation rates in health care and education, both of those have booming costs. Education costs have gone triple the rate of inflation over the last decade. And it's because the people that are getting the service aren't the ones who are paying for it and that leads to exploding costs.

GIGOT: Naomi?

SCHAEFER RILEY: I want to say something about the three-year college cost. It's funny, if you go back to the 1970's, which we've been thinking about a lot lately -- a lot of colleges actually reduced the length of their semesters, and they said this was to save costs for parents. But of course the semesters stayed shorter so kids got less education overall. And the prices never went down. So I think you also have to take these big ideas from schools about saving you money with a grain of salt.

GIGOT: The likelihood is that they would find a way to charge the same amount anyway, even if you only went for three years.

SCHAEFER RILEY: Exactly. That's exactly right.

(LAUGHTER)

HENNINGER: But you get out work earlier and start to work and pay back those loans.

(LAUGHTER)

GIGOT: That would be the benefit. It's an opportunity cost, would be lower.

But, Dan, the government is going to — isn't going to change any of this. If anything, they're increasing the subsidies. they want to make Pell Grants an entitlement. Right now, it has to be passed with annual appropriation. They want to make it automatic.

HENNINGER: Yeah, and, know, there is a social aspect of this as well. It's pretty well proven that the payoff to a college education is higher lifetime earnings. The demand for college now is tremendous. People are just going to these colleges. Probably what we need is probably online colleges or more colleges to meet the supply.

GIGOT: But which college doesn't necessarily help, does it?

SCHAEFER RILEY: No, no. There are a lot of studies that show if you're a person who got into both Harvard and, say, the University of Arkansas, and you chose the University of Arkansas, your lifetime earnings would not be that much different. One solution is improving K-through-12 education.

GIGOT: That would help enormously. And you might get higher returns on people who don't go to college or go to community colleges.

SCHAEFER RILEY: Yeah, the way it used to be.

[End excerpt]"

David Knowles
at Sphere

SAN FRANCISCO (Oct. 29) -- Billions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 are being spent on infrastructure projects across the country, but as this week's closing of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge shows, for every problem that gets addressed, it seems like 10 more are waiting.

[...]

For Wayne Klotz, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, any money allocated to updating the country's infrastructure is welcome. But he's also realistic about just how much the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act can do.

"Only 10 percent of the stimulus package went toward infrastructure. The percentage was relatively small. The primary purpose of the stimulus was to create jobs, not to improve infrastructure," he said.

In order to bring the country's infrastructure in line with past standards, ASCE estimates that the U.S. government would need to spend $2.2 trillion over the next 5 years. Asked to prioritize which areas of infrastructure he thinks need immediate attention, Klotz laughed.

"It's kind of like if your kid comes home with a report card with straight D's. Which subject do you start with? Take your pick. We've followed a 'patch and pray' method of infrastructure maintenance in this country. We don't have a single category that has a passing grade. [...]

President Barack Obama recently described the Recovery Act as "the largest investment in the nation's infrastructure since President Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System." The stimulus plan targets "shovel ready" programs, those that don't require new permits or exhaustive planning. As a result, Klotz said, the approach provides much needed maintenance, but still misses the bigger mark.

"Back in the '50s, '60s and even the first part of the 1970s, the percentage of money we used to spend on infrastructure was 5 to 7 percent of the budget," Klotz said. "We built the best infrastructure system in the world. Now, we're lucky if we spend 1 to 2 percent."

[...]

Ross McKeown, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the agency charged with planning and financing infrastructure projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, said California's stimulus funds are not sufficient to meet the challenges that drastically falling revenues and neglected infrastructure maintenance have brought.

"The stimulus is a one-time, stop-gap measure that doesn't come close to solving the larger issue," McKeown said. "Really, it's just a drop in the bucket."

As Klotz sees it, such steps are vital if we intend to see our economy thrive in the future. "Transportation is our economy," he said. "If our transportation system doesn't work, our economy doesn't work."

February 4, 2009:

TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punk'd. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd. Ending malaria is a particular passion of Gates's, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent millions fighting the disease. But he apparently didn't feel like TED attendees were taking the threat seriously.

"Not only poor people should experience this," Gates said as he let the bugs loose on his audience [...]

From a January 2004 review of Bill Ayers's memoir:

[...] America deserved hatred, Ayers explains. He thought the government fascist, its leaders obsessed with bombing foreign countries (from Hiroshima to Hanoi), and its society a sick class system run by loathsome whites.

[A FBI informant remembers Bill Ayers]:

Larry Grathwohl found Ayers hard to love; he seemed self-important, a controller of subordinates, the type who loved to give orders. Ayers was a key leader [of the Weatherman and Weather Underground radical organizations]. Grathwohl, a government informant, wrote that Ayers had helped direct a pair of attempted police building bombings in Detroit in February 1970:

After doing his assigned job in reconnaissance, Grathwohl disagreed with Mr. Ayers over the placement of one bomb, which could easily kill black patrons who favored an adjacent restaurant, but Ayers dismissed such sentimentality as unrevolutionary.

The informant was glad to be dismissed from the operation by Ayers. Forty-four sticks of dynamite were then formed into two bombs and put into place before Grathwohl’s information allowed police to dismantle both. Ayers’ memoir -- which freely admits to incompleteness -- says nothing of this episode, or Detroit, or the month of February 1970.

On a Sunday afternoon in March, the RBO blogger, Brenda J. Elliott and I got into an email conversation about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and globalization. After I told her a couple stories she suggested I write an essay on the topic and offered to research background articles for the piece. I replied:

"There is one thing you can do for me, although if you can find this information I'll keel from shock because I and one of my readers tried to find it on the internet and failed. A couple weeks there was a debate about protectionism on cable (Fox, CNBC or maybe CNN) in which one of the debaters said that 68 percent of the jobs for scientists and engineers in the USA were held by foreigners.

When the other person said that there weren't enough Americans to fill the jobs, the first man returned that this was not the case; it was just that U.S. companies wanted to hire foreigners.

He also said that when Microsoft and other companies were confronted about this, they replied in essence, 'We're not accepting TARP money so we can hire who we want and we want to hire foreigners.'

By the time I decided to make a note of the discussion I wasn't certain about the number the man quoted. The 68 percent was so staggering I worried I might have remembered it wrong. I haven't been able to find data that supports what he said -- and, no, I didn't get the man's name or his opposite in the debate."

Within moments of my request articles began appearing in my email in-box. As Brenda continued to tear up the internet looking for the quotes I'd mentioned, I read with a mounting sense of concern the articles she found. The following passages from an August 2008 column jumped out:

Wealthy advocates of H-1B visas have industriously worked to keep this employer-designed program hidden from middle-class Americans, who are outraged when they learn how it harms them.

In 2002, Nobel economics laureate Milton Friedman correctly identified the 1990 H-1B visa program as a "government subsidy" because it allows employers access to imported, highly skilled labor at below-market wages.

False allegations of worker shortages have been a popular approach. But American colleges and universities graduate four to six times the number of students needed to fill openings in technology fields that are generated by retirements and business expansion.

Consequently, since 1960, there have been more than 30 million graduates with bachelor's degrees who are qualified to work as scientists, engineers, computer programmers and mathematicians (the STEM fields) pursuing approximately 8 million "high tech" positions requiring this level of training. The importation of foreign technical professionals further swells the job-seeker ranks.

Between 1975 and 2005, more than 25 million admissions were approved in just five highly skilled visa programs.

Former Microsoft lobbyist Jack Abramoff helped direct $100 million in political expenditures between 1995 and 2000, enabling Microsoft and other employers to procure employer-friendly changes to H-1B visa legislation in 1996, 1998 and 2000. As a result of this work force glut, real wages in STEM fields have remained flat since at least 2000.

Contrary to Stuart Anderson’s claim, this program prevents innovation since American citizens are typically discarded by employers by age 35 — before their inventions can be turned into practical revenue generators.

It facilitates hiring discrimination against Americans. In the April 15, 2007, edition of the New York Times, Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath called H-1B the "outsourcing visa."

This program also undermines national security, as 200,000 U.S. science and engineering jobs have already been lost to communist China.

In the late 1980s, bureaucrats at the National Science Foundation found that they could increase the supply of technical professionals by importing them — offering foreign nationals the prospect of remaining in the United States.

This increase in supply depresses wages — an important policy objective.

One measure showing that this government intervention was successful (at least from the employers' perspective) is that a typical postdoctoral research or teaching position in a STEM field (requiring 12 years of education after high school) offers pay and benefits comparable to what a high school graduate earns managing a fast-food restaurant.

[...]

The transcript that Brenda found from a Lou Dobbs show on January 7, 2009, which I post at the end of this essay, helped fill in more of the story.

For all the wealth of material she turned up Brenda never did find the debate I mentioned because I was paraphrasing. But she came close enough to validating my key question; from various sources, it's a good guess that roughly 68% of the scientists and engineers working in the USA are indeed foreigners.

Yet the full story didn't come into focus until that Sunday afternoon. The story is that Americans who own many of the nation's most successful companies began dismantling the American science and engineering communities more than a decade ago.

And they did everything within their power to destroy the impetus for Americans to study science and engineering subjects; they did this in part by slashing wages in those fields to the point where the time an American invested in education for such careers translated to salaries that could be earned for a fraction of the educational investment.

The CEOs could get away with their actions because the foreigners they hired would work for peanuts -- and sometimes almost literally so; they would even work for free.

Yet these same American captains of industry, among them Bill Gates, lavished hundreds of millions of dollars in donations on American public education and lectured on the need for America to increase its investment in science and engineering education.

Why did Gates and his fellow travelers act in the way they did, when there were other ways to cut U.S. labor costs to stay competitive with foreign companies (e.g., offering stock to highly skilled American workers to make up for lower wages)?

Why did they open the floodgates for industrial spies who report to foreign governments, so the spies could easily steal U.S. research and technology?

Why did they betray the country they were born and raised in, and which protected them all their lives? Why did they betray the Americans who chose to work in engineering and science fields?

You might as well ask why Bill Gates found nothing unethical about helping to support his foundation's charitable giving to the world's poorest by investing for profit in vaccine research.

You might as well ask why he found nothing wrong with releasing mosquitoes, which carry diseases other than malaria, because he wanted a wealthy audience to turn out its pockets more.

He did it for the same reason Bill Ayers and his cadre found nothing wrong with the idea of murdering innocents to protest the Vietnam war.

They did it because they wished to do it; they did it because their wishes form their concept of morality and ethics.

That might be another way of describing a sociopath. But looking at the Fortune 500 companies that followed the Microsoft employment model, and at Bill Ayers's American sympathizers and apologists, that would mean America has raised up so many sociopaths during the past half century that the term is a poor guide to understanding what happened to us as a nation, how we go to this point.

That was what Glenn Beck tearfully asked, on the day he first showed a video of White House interim communications director Anita Dunn praising Mother Teresa and Mao Zedong in the same breath; this, while she stood in a cathedral and lectured American schoolchildren on striving to overcome great odds.

So how did we get to this point, where Americans could show such poor judgment they'd proffer the name of a mass murderer as a guide for schoolchildren? And where their wishes are the only moral guide that makes sense to them?

I believe the unvarnished answer is found in a segment aired by the "60 Minutes" TV news show a decade or so ago. An internet search for the transcript came up dry (I'm not in Brenda Elliott's research league), so you'll have to rely on my memory:

A series of murders occurred at a wildlife preserve in Africa -- this might have been in Kenya. The victims were different kinds of wild animals on the preserve. We don't usually refer to such deaths as 'murder' but the killings were so gruesome, so wanton, that to speak of them as anything other than murder isn't descriptive.

The preserve's authorities assumed at first that the murderers were poachers but on further investigation they realized that nothing was taken from the corpses -- not skins, glands, or tusks. The victims had simply been horribly mutilated.

So when the murders continued the police were called in and they set up clandestine surveillance. They didn't have long to wait before they discovered the identity of the murderers. It wasn't humans; it was a gang formed by all the young male elephants on the preserve. They sneaked around the preserve at night, then ganged up on the most defenseless animals they could find and ruthlessly slaughtered them, just for entertainment.

The investigators were incredulous. It was unheard of for elephants to act in such manner. They were acting in the manner of the most depraved human juvenile delinquents. Yet this kind of behavior was thought impossible for elephants, who are highly civilized.

The authorities separated the juvenile delinquents from the rest of the animals. Then they called in the psychiatrists and wildlife experts to study the perps, in the attempt to understand why the elephants, and just the males, had seemingly gone crazy.

All that the experts could figure was that the preserve lacked an old male elephant, which were in short supply; the available ones had been shunted to other preserves. The complexity of elephant society means that much elephant behavior isn't instinctual, it's learned.

So the experts theorized that without a respected elephant patriarch to show them proper behavior for a male elephant the youngsters had descended into a Lord of the Flies situation. Left to their own devices, perhaps the young elephants had fallen behind the most aggressive one among them, and thus soon turned to gangsterism and murder.

To test the theory an old bull elephant was imported and placed with the perpetrators. He immediately commanded their respect and affection. Then he quickly got them in line, showing them how a civilized male elephant acts. With that done, the young elephants were returned to the preserve (under close surveillance). Lo and behold their juvenile delinquency and murderous ways were a thing of the past.

The "60 Minutes" episode concluded with the observation that there might be lessons for humans in the tale of the murderous young elephants. Ya think?

I know this is unwelcome news for feminists. But there is much in addition to the elephant tale to suggest that unless young human males have a very strong patriarchal influence in their lives, they tend to rely on their wishes for moral guidance. This doesn't always work out well for society.

(I interject this doesn't let females off the hook; it's just that in general we're less aggressive than males unless we've had special training or been indoctrinated into a violent gang.)

The postwar Baby Boomer era in America saw public schools stuffed with many children and few adults -- usually one adult teacher to a room full of child students. This reversed the atavistic order of human society, where children were surrounded all day by many respected adults bossing them around and in the process teaching them appropriate behavior.

Particularly in the large cities, American Boomer public schoolchildren fell greatly under mob rule -- the rule of their peers -- a very unsettling situation for children and particularly males. Then, with the end of military conscription and the lessening of the authority of religious institutions, two more struts to a strong patriarchal influence on American males were kicked out.

That is why so many American males are converting to Islam. Whatever can be said against its practices and beliefs, the religion has retained a strong patriarchal influence, with rigid rules covering just about every aspect of human conduct. The rules at least provide guide wires for how males should act.

And that is also why American children schooled on military bases in the USA are remarkably free of the neuroses and behavioral problems that afflict so many children in American public schools. The children are always surrounded by highly respected male authority figures -- and female ones.

And because the schools are on the base, at least one parent can drop in on their child's classes or lunch periods every day, if only for a few minutes. This social order mimics the atavistic human tribal one: the young are constantly getting moral guidance from respected adults while at the same time they feel greatly protected -- not only from the worst of life in the adult and natural world but also from each other's worst sides.

To put all this another way, you can only thumb your nose at Mother Nature so much before you end up with large numbers of human specimens, both male and female, who bear a psychological resemblance to Bill Gates and Bill Ayers. Intelligence is not the issue here; character is.

Assuming for the sake of discussion my answer to Glenn's question is the ballpark, how do we back away from the abyss? The same way our society got so close to the edge: one step at a time. There's no going back to our tribal roots and we can't all raise our children on a military base. But there are several easy fixes that can be instituted in public schools, and which mirror the best aspects of tribal society to give children a sense of order and help instill good character. I'll discuss those fixes in a future post.

And we can recognize that American children who're placed in public school situations and exposed to classmates and teachers from a multitude of national and ethnic backgrounds and cultural assumptions need a unifying, shared core knowledge base. A good place to look for inspiration for such a base for all American schoolchildren is the work of education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Surely the best introduction to Hirsch's accomplishments is written by Sol Stern, a political scientist who writes extensively on American education issues, and whose criticism of Bill Ayers's education ideas is well known to those who were reading htis blog last year.

Writing for this month's issue of City Journal, Sol observes in his essay titled E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy: A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids:

At his Senate confirmation hearing in February, Arne Duncan succinctly summarized the Obama administration’s approach to education reform: “We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work.”

Since becoming education secretary, Duncan has launched a $4.3 billion federal “Race to the Top” initiative that encourages states to experiment with various accountability reforms. Yet he has ignored one state reform that has proven to work, as well as the education thinker whose ideas inspired it. The state is Massachusetts, and the education thinker is E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.[...]

A bonus is that Sol's article on Hirsh breaks down into simple English the 'Progressive' approach to public education, which for a quarter century has sown no end of confusion in young American minds.

Not content with confusion, Bill Ayers wishes to use the American public education system to accomplish what the Weatherman's violence couldn't, which is the destruction of American democracy.

So it's wise for parents with school-age children to learn about Ayers's education reform ideas and the inroads they've made in teacher education. After reading the article on Hirsch, parents might want to study Sol's writings about Ayers's education ideas and the writings of law professor Stephen Diamond's on the same topic. Between them, Steve and Sol raised the alarm last year, yet the general public has a way to go before it's aware of the ideas taught by Ayers and his cadre.

While Steve's 2008 reports about Ayers were focused on his relationship with Barack Obama, they're invaluable aids to understanding the complex 'race-based' ideas of Ayers's education cadre, and which Sol doesn't address separately from the cadre's interpretation of "social justice."

See Steve's May 21, 2008 essay, The "Monster in the Room": Does Obama Support Reparations? at his Global Labor blog and the October 06, 2008 The New York Times Magic Act!

1) January 7, 2009 Lou Dobbs show transcript:

LOU DOBBS: [...] Also, corporate America's aggressive campaign to drive down the wages of American scientists and engineers. That's not what they've been telling everybody. We'll tell you the truth, next.

LOU DOBBS: New evidence tonight there are enough American scientists in this country to fill job openings in science and engineering and in science and engineering companies, despite many industry claims to the absolute contrary. Those companies actively discourage American workers by keeping wages lower than they would otherwise be without foreign workers being imported. They keep wages low by exploiting visa rules and bringing cheap foreign workers into this country. Bill Tucker has the report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This fact from the National Science Foundation highlights a serious problem. "The number of foreign post-docs has increased by 52 percent since 1996, whereas the number of U.S. citizen and permanent resident post-docs has grown by nine percent."

The conventional wisdom is that that data shows a shortage of scientists and a dire need to bring in as many foreign scientists on H-1B visas as we can. Science professionals see it very differently. Beryl Benderly writes a monthly column for science careers on science labor force issues.

BERYL LIEFF BENDERLY, SCIENCE CAREERS COLUMNIST: There is no shortage of people. There are thousands of people who cannot find careers as scientists after they've been through years of training.

TUCKER: Studies from the Urban Institute, the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation all agree, the United States produces more scientists annually than science jobs. There is no shortage reflected in the pay they receive either. Ellis Research Services (ph), which has been doing wage studies in the science and engineering fields for 20 years, has consistently found pay for scientists to be in line with or lower than the average for all fields.

RON HIRA, ROCHESTER INST. OF TECHNOLOGY: There's no premium to these careers, and at the same time, what's happened is that there's been an increase in the risk to those workers, right, as employers cut, for example, benefits, as employers start to look to move work overseas, and a lot of science positions are vulnerable to being moved overseas.

TUCKER: In other words, there's a disincentive for choosing a career in science.

PROF. NORM MATLOFF, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA: The first thing the Obama people should do is take a hard look. Ignore the PR and take a hard look at what's really going on in terms of wages and job opportunities and science today.

TUCKER: There are winners. Just not the scientists.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TUCKER: A typical post-doc in their early 30s, after years of school, earning a PhD will earn about 35,000, maybe $40,000 a year in a research position. Helping keep those wages low, the fact that research institutions have unlimited access to H-1B visas. And according to Ron Hira, some 60 percent of post-docs are foreign students, Lou, here on guest worker visas.

DOBBS: I'm not sure I quite understand this. You're telling us that a person with a doctorate in this country, roughly 30 years of age, late 30s...

TUCKER: Right.

DOBBS: ... early 30s -- I mean late 20s, early 30s is making just about the same as the median household income in this country?

TUCKER: They're making about 35 or $40,000 a year, after all of those years of schooling...

DOBBS: That's incredible.

TUCKER: ... which really is below what a Bachelor...

DOBBS: So let me ask a question.

TUCKER: ... make.

DOBBS: Why would it not occur to geniuses like Bill Gates, who's had the tamari to stand in front of Congress and demand an infinite number of H-1B visas, why would it not occur to such a genius as Bill Gates and others in corporate America and in academia to perhaps offer greater pay for higher education in corporate America?

TUCKER: Well I can't speak for them, but they're the ones who benefit from the lower wages, Lou, so I would imagine they're acting as they would say in their own self-interest.

DOBBS: Well a horrible -- a horrible construction of self-interest, denying an incentive for people to move into those jobs and give them a living wage, outrageous.

(CROSSTALK)

DOBBS: And I really would love to hear from the Chamber of Commerce -- the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable. We invite you to come here and demonstrate to us the error of our ways because you've been among those, Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, and Bill Gates, I want to invite you too, Bill, because you and I have known each other a long time and you know I'm a straight shooter and I know that you can be when you're wrestled to the ground.

So why don't you come here and we'll talk about what's really going on, and how the American interest and American middle class workers can best be served. Because it looks like, frankly, folks, you're doing the nation a great disservice by distorting what is happening in this country for higher education, graduates, particular post-docs in corporate America.

Well there are right now 23 guest worker programs. By the way, I know you're one of those people, I'll bet you, who like me has listened to the president say we've got to have a guest worker program. Well, let me repeat that number. We keep trying to keep -- to figure out how many there are. And the number right now is just 23 guest worker programs.

So, Mr. President, I know you only got a couple of weeks left, a little less than that, but I want you to hear me loud and clear. As you've been going around the country saying this nonsense, there are 23 guest worker programs, folks. Foreign workers enter here under an alphabet soup of different visas in those guest worker programs.

In addition to the H visas there are also the E, the G, the I, the O, the P and there's an R-visa as well. There's also a visa for workers covered under NAFTA. In total, almost 810,000 foreign worker visas were issued in 2007. H-visas accounting for more than 400,000 of those workers and eight of the top 20 companies requesting H-1B visas last year -- are you ready -- those American companies looking for that skilled talent that Bill Gates talked about and the Chamber of Commerce wants, well, eight of the top 20 -- that's right, they were based in India. They were outsourcing jobs. Just thought we'd bring that to your attention as well, Mr. Gates.[...]

"Ayers has been peddling a heavily racialized, even racist, view of American life since his days in the SDS and Weather Underground in the late 1960s. That historical background is actually far more important to understanding the relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama than is widely understood."

Steve Diamond writes at his King Harvest blog:

The “Renaissance” of Bill Ayers
by Stephen Diamond, October 15, 2009

In the recent hubbub about whether or not Bill Ayers really admitted to a conservative blogger in the Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington D.C. his actual role in the writing of Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father little attention has been paid to why, exactly, Bill Ayers happened to be in Washington, D.C. that day.

It turns out Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a major conference organized by a consortium of schools of education at some 30 or so middle sized universities called The Renaissance Group. Ayers was given the only keynote luncheon speaker spot at the conference. The two morning keynote speakers were none other than Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education - and former foe of Ayers (and Obama) in the Chicago School Wars, and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter.

Both Duncan and Kanter come from segments of the education policy world that are distinctly separate from the world of people like Bill Ayers, Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, and Berkeley law professors Chris Edley and Goodwin Liu. Darling-Hammond, Edley and Liu were among the most important players in the Obama campaign on education issues and yet none of them received appointments in the new administration.

A major theme of the Renaissance organization is finding ways to educate the "New American Student," as described in a statement published a few years after the founding of the group in 1989. Prominent among the themes in this analysis - beyond the standard concern for early childhood education and math and science issues - are the significance of poverty, diversity and multiculturalism and the consequent alleged inability of white teachers to deal with the impact of such issues on their students.

The report states:

"Students [in schools of education] who are preparing to become teachers need a set of experiences that reflect multiculturalism, ethnic pluralism, and sex equity awareness...It is significant that the principles upon which the Renaissance Group was founded recognize multiculturalism as a campus-wide responsibility."

And thus the job of Education Schools, among other things, it argues, is to diversify their faculty and staff in order to reflect the new racial make up of students in the K-12 environment.

Of course, "multiculturalism" is, as the post-modernists like to say, "contested terrain." It is as much an ideology as it is a scientifically established fact. It would seem to me - and I admit I am only a law professor and political scientist, not an education school expert - that debate and free inquiry about controversial subjects would be at the top of the agenda of any education school and certainly of any consortium of education schools.

Multiculturalism, of course, is a theme dear to the heart of Bill Ayers. His most recent book co-authored with his wife and Weather Underground comrade Bernardine Dohrn argues that the original sin of American life is white supremacy and that this continues to be central to what ails this country.

Ayers has been peddling a heavily racialized, even racist, view of American life since his days in the SDS and Weather Underground in the late 1960s. That historical background is actually far more important to understanding the relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama than is widely understood. Most on the right have followed the lead of Sarah Palin with her "paling around with terrorists" line during the campaign. But that actually played into the hands of Obama defenders such as the New York Times which had little trouble "proving" that there was no serious relationship between Obama and Ayers, at least when it came to Ayers' violent political history.

Ayers' and Dohrn's bizarro view of American life grew out of their original experience in Students for a Democratic Society which was the major student anti-war organization for most the of the 1960s. As activists in SDS began to look for other issues to tackle they happened upon a combination of "community organizing" in poor neighborhoods and "local control" of urban schools. In both cases SDS activists tried to lead their own alternatives in poor and largely black parts of cities like New York and Chicago, ignoring the kinds of organizations such as unions and other non profit entities that had already established a presence there.

In New York SDS backed a reverse racist attack on the teachers' union that led to a controversial strike in 1968. That same year, Dohrn backed a controversial proposal that aimed to undermine SDS support for the industrial labor movement - just as that labor movement was about to enter one its most active phases since the Great Depression.

To have participated in the already well established labor and other movements, of course, would have meant a long hard slog through those institutions. That was not the kind of patience found in authoritarian "r-r-revolutionaries" like Dohrn and Ayers.

Thus it was not a big leap for Ayers to the Chicago School Wars in which he worked side by side with Barack Obama. They shared, and likely share, a deep affinity for what the Obama camp calls "race based" approaches to education and other aspects of American life. Ayers and Obama were both active in lobbying for local control of the Chicago school system in the wake of an unpopular teachers strike in Chicago in 1987 and 1988.

Six years later, Ayers secured a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation to establish the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers appointed Barack Obama as the Chairman of the Challenge board. A major focus of the Challenge was to funnel money to the same local control structure that the 1988 legislation established as well as support for a wide array of multicultural programs in the school system. At its heart the "local control" agenda of the Annenberg Challenge was to watch dog teachers and principals, many black, in the wake of the heat the Teachers Union had taken after the 87 strike.

The reform drew the attention of the Heritage Foundation and was in some ways a forerunner to the school choice, charter school and voucher movements that many on the so-called left in education say they militantly oppose. In many ways the Annenberg Challenge was, in fact, a conservative even authoritarian project. The Chicago Teachers Union had attempted themselves to gain support from Annenberg but it is not a surprise they chose Ayers instead.

The joint effort of Ayers and Obama was opposed by Mayor Richard Daley who was engineering the gutting of the failed local control experiment and re-centralizing governance of the troubled school system under his new hand picked CEO, Paul Vallas. Arne Duncan began his career in education management working under Vallas and later became CEO himself of the Chicago system before being tapped by Obama as Education Secretary.

Thus, the prominent participation of Ayers in the Renaissance conference comes as no surprise. What is notable, though, is that Duncan and Kanter were also participating. Clearly the White House has no problem being associated with Bill Ayers. Ayers, it would appear, is being allowed a "renaissance," so to speak, now that the potential of their shared history to undermine Obama has receded for the time being.

Bad FOX! Bad! Bad!

# posted by Pundita : 10/13/2009 03:42:00 AM  2 comments