It’s Not Funny September 20, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics, Uncategorized.Tags: tea party
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I must confess that I watch the goings-on in the political world with nothing but chagrin these days. When allegedly legitimate candidates for office advocate violence and threaten to repeal civil rights laws and the social safety net, I fear for this country and its people.
The so-called “tea party” movement with its radical pretensions and faux populist appeal has done well in some recent primaries. And “responsible” members of the GOP are doing nothing to discourage their ascendency while the media, seeking only controversy to sell ads, grovel at their feet.
In Delaware, Palin-endorsed tea partier Christine O’Donnell is so far right she’s called “delusional” by Delaware’s GOP leader. In Kentucky, Palin-favored Rand Paul says the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shouldn’t apply to businesses. In Colorado, tea partier Ken Buck talks of getting rid of the 17th amendment, which provides for the direct election of senators. In Nevada, Palin-favored Sharon Angle has called for “2nd Amendment remedies” if Congress doesn’t change hands. […]
When Newt Gingrich, who has all but declared his candidacy for president in 2012, says President Obama exhibits “Kenyan anti-colonial” behavior, and that allowing an Islamic center near New York’s Ground Zero is tantamount to permitting Nazi’s near the Holocost Museum, he doesn’t sound like an ordinary American. He sounds like a hate-mongering crackpot. We’re not dealing with “extremism in defense of liberty,” as Barry Goldwater put it in 1964 (and even then, a large majority of Americans decided against him). We’re dealing with extremism that defies the principles undergirding our Constitution. […]
We’re in the midst of an ongoing economic emergency that requires clear thinking, intense work, and practical ideas. It also requires that we join together rather than be pushed apart. The loonies who are taking over the GOP pose a real and present danger.
If these people were not being accepted, by mainstream politicians and the media, as responsible public servants, we could all just have a laugh at the marginal nutjobs who are sometimes attracted to politics.
But they are way too close to power for comfort. It is no longer funny.
Democrats, even if discouraged, need to come out to vote in November.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
When Hypocrisy Becomes Farce September 19, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, religion, Uncategorized.Tags: Catholicism, religion and ethics
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Following shortly on the heels of the announcement by a Church-appointed commission that uncovered pervasive child abuse in nearly every Catholic diocese in Belgium, this weekend, the Pope visited the UK and spewed more of his nonsense about “atheist extremism” which he claims threatens “traditional values”.
I didn’t know pederasty was a traditional value. But I guess its a good thing those Belgium priests were not atheists. Who knows what they would have done.
But then rank hypocrisy becomes farce: he blames the holocaust on atheism:
Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny” (Caritas in Veritate, 29).
That vicious authoritarian theocratic homophobic misogynist hierarchical thug presumes to blame atheists for Nazism when his own fucking church was all but an ally of the Nazis and really was an ally of Mussolini and Franco.
Indeed. Of course, Hitler was no atheist. He professed belief in Catholicism and was solidly supported by the church during his reign. The Pope’s historical revisionism goes beyond hypocrisy—it is an outright lie.
If you were making a movie about a rabid lunatic who became Pope could you find anyone better than Herr Ratzinger to play the part?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Intellectual Illness September 16, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy, Teaching, Uncategorized.Tags: critical thinking, skepticism
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Laurie Findrich reported on a classroom experience that indicates a pervasive intellectual illness:
The other day, during a class I was teaching on Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of how we know what we know about the artist came up. During the discussion, a student casually asserted, without rancor or even a touch of political commentary, that he thought it a “good possibility that Obama was a Muslim.” Another student nodded in agreement. Might be true, might not, they seemed to be saying. I got the distinct feeling that they thought that in their openness to the “possibility” that Obama was a Muslim, they were demonstrating their general openness to ideas—something I, as their professor, would be pleased to see. […]
Like everyone who pays attention to things, I know very well about the Pew study from this past August showing nearly one in five Americans think Obama is a Muslim. Why shouldn’t a few of those one in five Americans show up in a college classroom?
The students I encounter in my courses generally work hard and want to do well in college. They are intelligent. They want to learn things. But the “critical thinking” that’s been touted for the past several years seems to be yielding students who think that it’s a waste of time to think about things in terms of whether they are true or false. Instead, many seem to be learning that the proper and best attitude toward everything they encounter is doubt, and that nonstop doubt is the equivalent of being open-minded.
Some of the blame for this can be laid at the feet of modernism, which celebrated doubt. Modernist doubt grew out of philosophical skepticism, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the disastrous 20th century, which took the wind out of the sails of Western civilization in the minds of many. (Two vicious world wars that killed millions, it seems, caused certain sensitive people to question the civilization that brought them on.) Sometimes, the reaction to modern doubt is to retreat to certainty—God said it, I believe it, that settles it. Oftentimes, the reaction is increased tolerance—openness to new ideas and a tolerance of others who are different. With many college students today, however, it seems to mean simply giving credence to anything, no matter how absurd. In absorbing the lesson that there are limits to reason, they’re concluding that more or less nothing can be ruled out by reason. Their philosophy can be summed up in these words: “I’m just saying, who knows?”
They’re cool with amorphous ideas that contain no rigor. Why try to figure it out? Maybe some people can talk to the dead; global warming may or may not be true; Princess Diana possibly was murdered; maybe 400 mcg’s of folic acid, taken three times a day, makes you smarter. Or maybe Obama is a Muslim. Who knows?
Skepticism can be aid to critical thinking. It is essential to philosophy and to science. It drives inquiry forward by sustaining the uncomfortable feeling of doubt and discouraging the premature leap to an unwarranted conclusion. But it is only a virtue if it is accompanied by a fierce commitment to seek the truth, as it was for Socrates or Descartes. Without a commitment to truth, skepticism is toxic, an invitation to intellectual laziness, boredom, and ultimately a stultifying inability to act.
Findrich is right to be concerned. […]
While higher-education critics are diligently trying to figure out how much students are not learning and how much it’s costing taxpayers (and the students and their parents) not to learn anything, we’re facing a slow meltdown of knowledge—an insidious, ongoing event, on a colossal scale, whose consequence is unpredictable. As surely as knowledge disappeared in the past by the burning of the great library at Alexandria, and the loss of ancient languages (in Europe in the late middle ages), knowledge can be destroyed by the attitude of indifference. If knowledge collapses into nothing but, “Maybe, who knows?” we’ll end up longing for the glory days when students lovingly visited Wikipedia in order to find the truth.
I am afraid we often encourage the skepticism but leave out the bit about the pursuit of truth. That is a tragic error.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Race and Gender Cannot Explain Increasing Inequality September 14, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Uncategorized.Tags: inequality, Timothy Noah
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As I have noted often on this blog, inequality—the Great Divergence—has increased rather dramatically in the U.S.
The question is why, a question Timothy Noah is attempting answer in his series of articles at Slate.
Most discussion about inequality in the United States focuses on race and gender. That makes sense, because our society has a conspicuous history of treating blacks differently from whites and women differently from men. Black/white and male/female inequality persist to this day. The median annual income for women working full time is 23 percent lower than for their male counterparts. The median annual income for black families is 38 percent lower than for their white counterparts. The extent to which these imbalances involve lingering racism and sexism or more complex matters of sociology and biology is a topic of much anguished and heated debate.
But we need not delve into that debate, because the Great Divergence can’t be blamed on either race or gender. To contribute to the growth in income inequality over the past three decades, the income gaps between women and men, and between blacks and whites, would have to have grown. They didn’t.
The black/white gap in median family income has stagnated; it’s a mere three percentage points smaller today than it was in 1979. This lack of progress is dismaying. So is the apparent trend that, during the current economic downturn, the black/white income gap widened somewhat. But the black/white income gap can’t be a contributing factor to the Great Divergence if it hasn’t grown over the past three decades. And even if it had grown, there would be a limit to how much impact it could have on the national income-inequality trend, because African-Americans constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Women constitute half the U.S. population, but they can’t be causing the Great Divergence because the male-female wage gap has shrunk by nearly half. Thirty years ago the median annual income for women working full-time was not 23 percent less than men’s, but 40 percent less. Most of these gains occurred in the 1980s and early 1990s; during the past five years they halted. But there’s every reason to believe the male-female income gap will continue to narrow in the future, if only because in the U.S. women are now better educated than men. Ever since the late 1990s female students have outnumbered male students at colleges and universities. The female-male ratio is currently 57 to 43, and the U.S. Department of Education expects that disparity to increase over the next decade.
Far from contributing to the Great Divergence, women have, to a remarkable degree, absented themselves from it. […] during the past three decades, women have outperformed men at all education levels in the workforce. Both men and women have (in the aggregate) been moving out of moderately skilled jobs—secretary, retail sales representative, steelworker, etc.—women more rapidly than men. But women have been much more likely than men to shift upward into higher skilled jobs—from information technology engineer and personnel manager on up through various high-paying professions that require graduate degrees (doctor, lawyer, etc.).
These findings suggest that women’s relative gains in the workplace are not solely a You’ve-Come-a-Long-Way-Baby triumph of the feminist movement and individual pluck. They also reflect downward mobility among men.
And as Noah reports, conservative arguments that inequality is a product of single parents or the breakdown in the family also don’t wash.
But it would be difficult to attribute much of the Great Divergence to single parenthood, because it increased mostly before 1980, when the Great Divergence was just getting under way. By the early 1990s, the growth trend halted altogether, and though it resumed in the aughts the rate of growth was significantly slower.
Also, single parenthood isn’t as damaging economically as it was at the start of the Great Divergence. “That’s mostly because the percentage of women who are actually working who are single parents went up,” Jencks told me. In a January 2008 paper, three Harvard sociologists concluded that the two-thirds rise in income inequality among families with children from 1975 to 2005 could not be attributed to divorce and out-of-wedlock births. “Single parenthood increased inequality,” they conceded, “but the income gap was closed by mothers who entered the labor force.” One trend canceled the effects of another (at least in the aggregate).
So there is little evidence supporting either liberal or conservative arguments regarding increases in inequality.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Face of the Other September 13, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, ethics of care, Science, Uncategorized.Tags: Emmanuel Levinas, ethics and emotions
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Those of you who have read my work in ethic know that I think the writings of Emmanuel Levinas are especially helpful in explaining moral authority.
One main idea in Levinas’s work is that ethical conduct is a response to “the face of the Other”. In less metaphorical terms, this means that morality gets its authority from our capacity to respond to the vulnerability and particularity of another person which place demands on us that we are compelled to acknowledge.
And now there is some scientific evidence supporting Levinas’s view. Here is John Cookson at Big Think:
Is a person’s propensity toward evil a matter of malfunctioning synapses and neurons?
Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” says it is. Ever-more-detailed brain scans are revealing the biological origins of psychological issues in “evil” people, from those who are mildly antisocial to serial murderers.
Under each brain’s wrinkly cortex lies the limbic system, an evolutionary heirloom controlling emotion and motivation, among other functions. Within this limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped cluster of nuclei that processes our feelings of fear and pleasure.
Murderers and other violent criminals have been shown to have amygdalae that are smaller or that don’t function properly, explains Stone. One recent study concluded that individuals who exhibit a marker of “limbic neural maldevelopment” have “significantly higher levels of antisocial personality, psychopathy, arrests and convictions compared with controls.”
The amygdala is important because, among its other functions, it allows an individual to respond to the facial expressions of others. When a person has an abnormal amygdala—one that doesn’t process the facial expressions of emotion—they can have an inability to register the fear and suffering of a victim, says Stone. This lack of response to the emotions of others predisposes an individual to antisocial, even criminal, behavior.
Perhaps we should stop referring to the “face of the Other” as a metaphor.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Media Farce September 12, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics, Uncategorized.Tags: irresponsible news media, New York mosque, Terry Jones
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It looks like the pseudo-story of a nutjob Florida minister’s threat to burn the Koran has run its course. So its time to point out once again how the news media have failed.
Jason Linkins had the most compelling take:
The story of how one lone idiot, pimping an 18th-century brand of community terrorism, held the media hostage and forced some of this nation’s most powerful people to their knees to fitfully beg an end to his wackdoodlery is an extraordinary one.
Indeed it was, but as Linkins points out the story begins with the pseudo story of a proposed mosque to be built in Manhattan.
Earlier this year, an organization called the Cordoba Initiative were granted permission by the appropriate authorities in New York City to turn an old Burlington Coat Factory at 51 Park Place in lower Manhattan into a community center. The organization was headed by an Imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has made it his life’s work to stand against radical cults like al Qaeda and teach young Muslims that America is a place where one can freely worship at the appointed times and then join other faith communities in America in the task of building a great nation. The proposed community center was to include a basketball court and space for different religious communities in New York City to have interfaith relations. It was also going to have a place for Muslims to pray, if they liked.
The news didn’t sit well with many people in New York, most notably people who didn’t live in Manhattan. This is because they were told by a gaggle of dumb Islamophobes that what was planned was a “Ground Zero mosque.” Of course, the planned community center was not, strictly speaking, a “mosque.” And it was most definitely not “at Ground Zero.” “Ground Zero” is the site of an interminable municipal construction project. There are no plans to build a mosque there. “Ground Zero” is also not the name of a recognized New York City neighborhood, like DUMBO or Murray Hill. But, here’s the thing: even if it was, the battle to stop the “Ground Zero mosque” was already lost, because there already is a mosque in that neighborhood.
But the media seldom saw fit to report these facts.
As soon as the media saw themselves a shiny shiny shining thing shining shinily in New York City, they pounced! How perfect! Something for us to talk about during the slow-news summer! I mean, we could talk about the nation’s unemployment crisis, but that would mean we’d have to talk to poor, jobless people, and there’s no currency in having access to a bunch of poors. Right away, they accepted the premise that this was a “Ground Zero mosque,” when it wasn’t. And so, by the power vested in the media, things that weren’t in fact true were accorded the privilege of being “one side of a great debate” and “an interesting point of view.”
[…] And because the media couldn’t do their job, a group of hack politicians, like Rick Lazio and Newt Gingrich, desperate to get a little famewhore attention for their quixotic political career goals, saw an opportunity to horn in on the “discussion.” They started telling all the sad and angry people that they actually did have the right to expect someone to provide a remedy to their claims. Their case was primarily based on the idea that nobody has the rights of religious freedom, no one has property rights and that the government has the right — nay, the duty! — to intrude.
Of course these are the same right wing politicians who endlessly bleat about how church and state should not be separate, property rights must always be respected and the government should stay out of our business. But true-to-form this rank hypocrisy was not reported in the media either.
And from there, some idiot news producer said, “Hey, I bet we can shoehorn this into our election narrative somehow!” And so the Park51 community center became an election issue. Imagine that, in a world with a nine year-long, going nowhere war and a massive unemployment crisis! Imagine how many times you would have to hit yourself in the head with a ball peen hammer before you would ask a politician from California how they stood on a local zoning issue in Manhattan.
[…]
And in that climate, a pastor named Terry Jones saw an opportunity to make himself famous. Jones heads up a heretofore unknown and uncared-about gang of Florida morons known as the Dove Outreach Church — minor bit players in the field of antagonizing American Muslims. This idiot announced that he was going to burn some Qurans on September 11th, and was anyone interested in giving this nonsense a whole lot of media attention?
And boy howdy, lots of people took him up on the offer!
[…]
And the media worked very hard to push the case that Jones was part of a debate. Now, Quran burning was an election-year issue, for which every candidate had to answer. And they even went so far as to ask Jones repeatedly, “What if President Obama told you not to do this? What if former President George W. Bush told you not to do this?” They were literally brokering negotiations between an idiot cult leader and some of the most powerful and important people in the world!
By now, things were terribly out of control. President Obama had to publicly state that Quran burning is a stupid thing to do. Imagine how out of touch you have to be that you need to go all the way to the White House to find that answer! Other important people were compelled to interject at this point. General David Petraeus had to come forward and state the plainly obvious: that all the public attention being given to this Quran burning would undermine the ability of U.S. forces to conduct their counterinsurgency operations, which depend heavily on winning the “hearts and minds” of Afghans.
[…]
All of this finally culminated with yesterday’s press conference, where Terry Jones lied and said that the Park51 community center was going to move, thanks to him. You see where this is headed now, don’t you? Now the people behind Park51 are on the hook for stopping this Quran burning, and all of the negative external impact it may have. Now, all of the refined hate-merchants from early in the story can say that if the “Ground Zero mosque” isn’t moved, immediately, American troops could die!
To go back to Charlie Brooker, let’s remember that after sizing up the incompetence that pervaded the Park51 coverage, he warned that the “media” should just “give up” before they “[made] things worse.” Pretty prophetic, isn’t it? They got played, and played badly, by a dude with 14th-century religious beliefs, 19th-century facial hair and ultra-modern media savvy. Terry Jones has essentially blackmailed some of the most important people in America, with the assistance of the media.
Let’s remember that all of this paralysis was caused by 50 people who wanted to burn a book that’s available for free, on the Internet!
There were many, many moments where someone could have simply said, “No, we should really not be doing this. These Islamophobes are objectively wrong, objectively stupid, objectively contradictory, objectively harmful, and by God, as someone with a functioning brain and a devotion to the pursuit of reason above all else, I am going to stand here and say no to all of this.” But as it turns out, it wasn’t until yesterday afternoon that someone finally had the guts to say maybe we cannot really believe a word this man is saying.
Well, they should have thought of that before they decided to point a bunch of teevee cameras at him, I guess.
When the history of America’s decline is written the mainstream news media will rightly be accused of hastening the demise, but I’m sure that will go unreported as well.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
An Unexpected Hint of Contrition September 9, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly reports on a surprising conversation with Fidel Castro:
There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).
Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. […] [D]uring the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”
I guess he is a slow learner—it only took him 50 years to figure that out.
There are some minor changes afoot in Cuba:
Raul Castro is already loosening the state’s hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate.
Of course we cannot invest in Cuba, or even travel there, because of our idiotic embargo which has probably done more to keep Castro in power than his minions of secret police and informants.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fundamental change in our relations with Cuba in the not too distant future.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Myth of Equality September 9, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy, politics, Uncategorized.Tags: economic mobility, inequality, Timothy Noah
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In 1915, the richest 1% garnered 18% of the nations income, according to Timothy Noah, writing a serious of articles about inequality on Slate
This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America’s richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy. The socialist movement was at its historic peak, a wave of anarchist bombings was terrorizing the nation’s industrialists, and President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, Alexander Palmer, would soon stage brutal raids on radicals of every stripe. In American history, there has never been a time when class warfare seemed more imminent.
[…] Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income. What caused this to happen?
Over the next couple weeks, Noah will try to explain this trend toward greater inequality. But getting the timeline right is essential for a coherent account.
Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have termed this midcentury era the “Great Compression.” The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation—the era of Life magazine and the bowling league—reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America’s middle class.
The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade’s end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts.
…from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.
Why don’t we pay more attention to this increase in inequality?
One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill” was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, not to mention Germany, France, and the UK have income distributions more equal than ours, yet this seldom is a successful campaign issue. The myth of American commitment to equality dies hard.
If we are to get a handle on this issue, we will need to know the cause of the growing inequality—so I will be following Noah’s installments as he lays out the explanation.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Philosophy on the TeeVee September 7, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy, Uncategorized.Tags: Philosophy
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Philosophy departments across the U.S. are being decimated by bean counters but at least philosophy now has its own TV channel.
Actually, this site looks interesting—top notch philosophers addressing important issues.
Honoring Our Workers With a Knife in the Back September 6, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics, Uncategorized.Tags: Labor Day, labor unions
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Labor Day may be our most hypocritical holiday in the U.S.
Here is Harold Meyerson on the state of our working class:
Consider: As of this year, U.S. gross domestic product is about 1 percent beneath its 2008 peak, compared to a drop of roughly 2 percent in France and Germany and 5 percent in Britain and Japan. But U.S. unemployment has increased roughly 5 percentage points since 2007, compared to just 1 point in France and Japan and 2 in Britain. In Germany, unemployment has actually dropped a point since the recession began. […]
As Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin of Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies have documented, pretax corporate profits increased $388 billion from the low point of the current recession, the second quarter of 2009, to the third quarter thereafter, while wages increased just $68 billion. […]
A survey, released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, shows that employee premiums rose 13.7 percent over last year, while the amount that employers contributed dropped — dropped! — 0.9 percent.
Only a purblind ideologue could miss the pattern here. American employers — more than employers in other nations and more than American employers in earlier downturns — have imposed the costs of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing business.
[…]
…the U.S. private sector is almost entirely — 93 percent — nonunion. Unlike European workers, unlike their own parents and grandparents who lived in a much more heavily unionized America, U.S. workers are now powerless to stop their employers from pocketing all the change.
Enjoy your Bar B Q.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
