The Real Class War

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Average pre-tax incomes in 2006 jumped by about $60,000 (5.8 percent) for the top 1 percent of households, but just $430 (1.4 percent) for the bottom 90 percent, after adjusting for inflation, according to a new update in the groundbreaking series on income inequality by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Their analysis of newly released IRS data shows that in 2006, the shares of the nation’s income flowing to the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of households were higher than in any year since 1928.

Average Income in 2006 up $60,000 for Top 1 Percent of Households, Just $430 for Bottom 90 Percent. Chye-Ching Huang and Chad Stone, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

I was watching Fox News on Saturday, after Senator Obama’s vice-presidential announcement, and William Crystal, that weird rolly-polly gnome of the right, called Senator Biden the perfect candidate to start the class war. They mean, of course, that Biden is pro-union and pro-women, generally speaking, and can start hammering away at McCain’s “welfare for the rich” economic programs.

It’s classic right-wing rhetorical Judo, as Huang and Stone’s work shows. You take the truth– that there’s been a radical shift of wealth from the poor, working, and middle-classes to the rich– and you insist on the opposite. If you repeat it often enough, it starts to sound like the truth. The farther you get from the actual truth, you more you need to exaggerate. Thus, “The Audacity of Socialism.”

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Union, War, Writing

Employee Free Choice Act 1, Walmart 0

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Wal-Mart’s worries center on a piece of legislation known as the Employee Free Choice Act, which companies say would enable unions to quickly add millions of new members. “We believe EFCA is a bad bill and we have been on record as opposing it for some time,” Mr. Tovar said. “We feel educating our associates about the bill is the right thing to do.”

Other companies and groups are also making a case against the legislation to workers. Laundry company Cintas Corp., which has been fighting a multiyear organizing campaign by Unite Here, relaunched a Web site July 14 called CintasVotes. The site instructs visitors to take action by telling members of Congress to oppose the legislation.

Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win – WSJ.com

It sounds bad, but this is actually very good news, in that it indicates that our corporate pals, who do read the fine print, seem certain that the Employee Free Choice Act will pass very soon in an Obama administration. Among other things, the EFCA would put some teeth in the protections for unionizing workers and greatly simplify the union ratification process.

A quick search on the act yields links to every right-wing site Orwellian mishmash on the web; another good sign for the efficacy of the bill. The AFL-CIO site is the best place to vaccinate yourself with the facts and the basic ideas before you take a dip in la la land.

The reason for all of this below-the-radar fuss is that if the obstacles to union membership were reduced, there might be a huge swell in organizing. One Gallup poll done a few years ago suggested that 58% of Americans would join a union if they could. That would be change well beyond Obama.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Union, Writing

The Dream of (Canadian) Centralization

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A Gartner analyst thinks Canada’s natural resources and cooler temperature can help it take advantage of the growing cloud computing trend to provide services and Web applications.

The country has an estimated server installed base of more than one million units, and in the next five years, the market will demonstrate incremental growth typical of a mature market, said Jeffrey Hewitt, vice-president of research with Stamford, Conneticut-based Gartner Inc.

“But is there a way in Canada for that to be boosted beyond that standard incremental projection?” asked Hewitt.

He thinks the country’s years of investment in hydro electric power facilities and ambient temperatures will enable data centres to be powered and subsequently cooled. And, he said, the concerns around power and cooling are only getting bigger as Web content grows with video sharing sites like YouTube. Therefore, the country can take its hydro electric infrastructure to “another level” and extend it to the Web, said Hewitt.

Canada primed for cloud computing: Gartner | The Industry Standard, Kathleen Lau, ComputerWorld Canada.

I used to work at a school that dreamed the dream of centralization and not surprisingly, it was a disaster. This dream is a variant of the automated factory dream; the idea that one day we can get rid of all of those pesky, complaining, expensive workers.

I’m no Luddite. This dream has to do with the idea of a pure profit, divorced from human labor, not with technology. Technology is simply the dominant strategy of the dream in our time. In universities, the dream is as strong as anywhere else, maybe stronger.

Imagine a school without teachers and their pesky unions! Actually, though, the dream as I experienced it had to do with the expense of support people. We had a nightmare of a classroom computer system that needed to be updated. That was clear.

It was also clear that the reason the system was a nightmare was that there was not enough support personnel. Somehow, someone heard about “thin clients”– computers that were, in effect, nothing but a monitor and a box with some flash memory. The software lives on a central server.

It sounds so great. Obviously, the real problem isn’t a lack of support personnel, it’s those wacky students and teachers who keep messing up the system. The “thin clients” made sure that no one could change anything important. It made support almost unnecessary!

The dream was, of course, utterly wrong. In fact the new system was even more of a nightmare than the old, outdated computers. If one thing went wrong somewhere on the network, none of the computers would work. Another dream come true.

The idea of putting the servers in cold places is a good one, but I think it’s also important to think very carefully about cloud computing as the latest instance of the dream of centralization. It’s fine to put all our You-Tube videos in the same place. I’m not sure the same holds true for much else.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Composition, Economics, Professional, Union, Writing

It IS Not about Technology

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We have technologies now that allow us to carry forward the evidence of work and the work itself from semester to semester. Though we can use the semester time frame as a way to define fees and revenue, there is no longer a reason to use the semester time frame as a way to define student work. Students already learn in many alternate ways on many differing but formalized learning paths. Higher education is expert in managing experiential or co-op learning, semesters abroad, internships, service learning, and so on. We know how to create structures based on the work itself and the natural work cycle, just as in real life, so altering how we structure a learning cycle is fully within our expertise.

It IS about Technology: Integrating Higher Ed into Knowledge Culture— Trent Batson, Campus Computing, 8/6/2008

I shouldn’t get all cranky– Batson’s making a legitimate point. The current educational pattern– classes, semesters, lecture halls– hasn’t changed all that much in the last one hundred years when compared to the changes in technology and the rest of our lives.

As a professor of mine used to say, you can look at photographs of classrooms from the late 19th century and things won’t look so different than they do now. At some point things are going to change, and the new system may suddenly snap into place like a rubber band.

On the other hand, the current system grew up under the assumption that educational access should be universal and universally good. The new system seems to be emerging out a very rigid class system, in which material privilege is hardly challenged.

The poor have one medical system, the middle class another, the rich yet another. It seems, too, that the new technology increasingly means the poor will have one education system, the middle class another, and the rich their own. It’s class, not technology.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing