The Class War in the Air

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An up-and-coming pilot with a commuter airline, Rebecka Shaw was paying her dues.

The 24-year-old old lived with her parents near Seattle, Wash., and worked at a coffee shop there on her days off. When the time came for her to fly, she commuted to work at Virginia-based Colgan Air.

As a copilot, she was paid $21 an hour, but only for flying time – not for layovers, typically in the New York area, or her cross-continent commute. She grossed $16,254 in her first year of work.

“I had gone back to visit with her, and she actually shared what she was making. ‘Well, it’s … $1,000 a month, Mom,’ ” said her mother Lynn Morris, in an interview with a Washington news station yesterday. She had visited her daughter during a layover.

Life in the cockpit ‘a recipe for an accident’, JOSH WINGROVE, May 14, 2009

The right wing and their fellow travelers love to accuse working people in unions of being selfish. They are just out for themselves, the logic goes, and if they are allowed to win better benefits and wages we will all suffer. Not surprisingly unions rightfully see this as simplistic nonsense. A better paid teacher, or an auto worker with a good health care, or a nurse with job security, is good, for all of us.

The recent revelations about about Continental’s treatment of Rebecka Shaw is a case in point. In the current political environment corporations have a almost completely free hand in how they treat workers. If you are an executive, you can pay yourself millions of dollars and arrange for a generous severance package if you are fired. You can also risk all of our lives by creating a new cadre of part time pilots.

Posted in: Economics, Union

What We Talk About (When We Don’t Want to Talk About Class)

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For years, parents, students, and taxpayers have lamented the spiraling cost of higher education — with too little effect. Between 1982 and 2007, college tuition and fees increased 439 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the median family income only rose 147 percent. Pleas by ACTA and others to cut costs fell on mostly deaf ears.

The recession is now compelling at least some universities to cut back on all the pricy extras that drive up cost and shift the focus back to the fundamental purpose of their institutions: education. In January, ACTA praised the Pennsylvania State Board of Education for approving a proposal to create a “low cost, no frills” bachelor degree. Now comes news of a similar degree at Southern New Hampshire University — a “low-cost airline equivalent,” according to its president — and plans to create a new affordable state university in Arizona with no football team or research programs.

ACTA’s Must Reads, Posted by David Azerrad on May 07, 2009

The ACTA is reliably reactionary, much more interested in the academic trains running on time than in education generally or employment issues. Antonio Gramsci himself would rise up out of his grave if they mentioned the exploitation of graduate students or the commercialization of education.

Yet their concerns are, as the theorists used to say, symptomatic of the anxieties and concerns of our nominal rulers. I am not sure if they represent a cadre of the technical elite or of the financial elite or both but they are ideally positioned to judge the temperature of our ongoing cold (class) war.

So it’s fascinating that they are concerned with the increasing scarcity of the cultural capital represented by traditional liberal arts colleges. I don ‘t think you can attribute this to bourgeois sentimentality. The more bloated these increasingly boutique universities become, the better the chance of some sort of backlash.

The rhetoric of education in the U.S. is democratic; everyone can work hard and get the education of their choice. In fact, only 1/3 of us have college degrees; the percentage who have gone to these elite colleges is much smaller. Yet these schools play a disproportionately important role in our educational self-image.

If these schools become even more inaccessible, and the mass market schools follow by continuing to raise tuition and fees, the U.S. might seem too obviously undemocratic and class ridden. We can’t talk about that, though, can we? So we talk about ‘budget schools’ that might siphon off a bit of that class tension.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing

Unraveling the U.S. Middle Class

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Interest rates on student loans, including on popular federal programs like the unsubsidized Stafford (now nearly 7 percent) and Parent Plus (8.5 percent), are running several percentage points higher than the rates on secured loans, like home equity lines of credit.

“The difference of rates between secured and unsecured loans is higher than I have ever seen,” said Scott White, director of counseling services at Westfield High School in New Jersey. “This is one further impediment to access to post-secondary education for all but the well-to-do.”

Judy Campbell, Brennan’s guidance counselor at Hollywood High School, where three of every four students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, suggested that his family was “not poor enough for need-based aid and not rich enough to write a check.”

When asked over dinner whether she felt guilty that Brennan had taken so much upon himself, his mother, Caryn, began to cry. “We didn’t expect to end up in this situation,” she said.

Goal Is College. Hurdle Is Finding Financial Aid, New York Times, JACQUES STEINBERG, April 30, 2009

Americans take the middle class society of the last half-century for granted, assuming that if “the economy” is prosperous then “most of us” will be prosperous. It’s not surprising, since “most of us” have never known any other culture /economy (unless you are older than 60 or even 70) and few have been overseas.

In fact, there is no real reason why the U.S. economy can’t become something else. We could become a society permanently and sharply split between cultural and financial haves and have not’s, with little in-between. As long as we buy into Reagan’s first principal (“government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem”) this is the risk we take.

Markets, left to themselves, will concentrate the wealth of a society in smaller and smaller groups. The ideals of a democracy make it clear that this concentration of wealth is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst. So we need the government (among others) to counter this concentration.

There are all sorts of ways to do this, from the income tax (minus the loop holes that make it so regressive) to inheritance taxes to educational funding. The conservative focus on Regan’s aphorism, then, has only ensured that the United States has become progressively less democratic.

Cheap, accessible education is not a luxury to be set aside until the economic crisis is over. A recession will shift capital in all sorts of ways but it will not prevent the ongoing concentration of wealth and power. If we don’t drive down the cost of education, and make more (non-loan) money available for students, Obama’s election won’t mean a thing.

Posted in: Composition, Economics, Professional

What Ignorance Looks Like, Part II: Willful Ignorance

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This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

New York Times, SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI, April 21, 2009

I thought I would write about this in the abstract, starting with my shock that this story hasn’t created an ongoing scandal. Imagine that you went to the doctor and he or she was unsuccessful at treating your disease. That’s upsetting enough. Now imagine that you read an interview with that doctor and he or she says that reading medical journals is a waste of time. That’s a scandal.

So this is doubly freakish and bizarre. We had a government that chose to ignore history; more than that, a set of officials at the highest level who thought that history was unnecessary. It just doesn’t occur to them. Then we have the mainstream media– today busily debating the ‘hundred days’ faux issue– that collectively cannot seem to recognize and criticize basic incompetence.

I am thinking much more concretely this morning, however, because I have been trying to deal with a student who thinks writing about “global warming” is inappropriate. It’s not hard to see where this is coming from: years of silly right wing propaganda suggesting that global warming isn’t real and so on. I disagree but that’s not what is so upsetting.

What is upsetting is that this student has a workable hypothesis– it may be unlikely in the extreme that thousands of scientists and thousands of experiments are wrong, of course, but it is still a hypothesis– that he refuses to examine. One problem, of course, is that he’s too ambitious. Global Warming is a very complicated theory with a lot of different kinds of supporting evidence.

I would not expect him to try to address everything of course or to be systematic in any sense. But he could pick one aspect of global warming, review the evidence, and then conclude with his (now well-informed) opinion on the science. Yet it seems to be that process– a careful review of assumptions– that he, and the Bush administration, finds so loathsome. That’s a scandal.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing