Show Me The (Public) Money!

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Ordinarily, when people speak of income disparity they are talking about individuals or about classes of individuals. The statistics are amazing: the U.S. hasn’t had this wide of a disparity in at least 8 decades.   The disparity is often even more shocking when you compare institutions.  I found two stories in this vein today. On the one hand, the Sacramento, California Public Library system is planning to cut hours in an attempt to prevent lay offs of employees.

In the richest state in the richest country in the world the most basic of public services, the library, has to cut hours (“Sacramento Public Library closures scheduled due to staff furloughs“).  You can just hear the austerity folks chanting their song: “We have made unsustainable promises for so long, and now it’s time to pay the piper.  The recession has been over for a while but the economy is only growing slowly, etc. There’s not enough money.”

Only, that’s not true; there’s a lot of money but it’s elsewhere: “MIT and Harvard pour $60M into “edX” online courses.”  I like the idea of free online courses but I can’t help but wonder why two private institutions have access to huge pools of money for this sort of program while, on the other side of the country, indeed in most of the country, public institutions are struggling to survive.  I suspect the answer is public policy not accident.

The French election of a socialist government, led by Francios Hollande, isn’t a simplistic “rejection of austerity.” It is also a recognition that we, the Western Democracies, do have the money, but it lies elsewhere. Here in the U.S., we’ve essentially disarmed ourselves, dismantling labor unions and filling legislative houses with Republicans servants of the status qua.   In Europe that hasn’t happened and there’s a chance priorities can be changed.

Posted in: Economics, Professional

Corporate Greed? There’s a App for That

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“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, New York Times

[Apple]… paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.

“How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes,” Charles Duhigg and David Kocientewski, New York Times

I might have missed these articles if it weren’t for the New Faculty Majority blog, which pointed me to the “Remaking the University” blog, a site focused on California Education…  I’ve been  thinking about the links among consumerism, technology, and education for some time but this is a slightly different angle that I had not considered in any depth.  That is, there’s a direct link between contemporary consumerism and the economic destruction of higher education.

I think that using technology in the classroom is a good idea but I suspect that the push for technology is also fed by simple consumerism.  In some cases, pedagogy seems to get lost in the ongoing push for the newest sexy consumer electronics. Sherry Turkle (caution, the  video plays automatically) has famously argued, for example, that technology can inhibit the sociability and the self-refection necessary for learning. Call it Facebook alienation.

I have never been seduced by Apple’s closed-system. I was one of those people willing to put up with a computer that broke now and again rather than use a computer whose workings were hidden. Aesthetically, Apple has always seemed like one of those creepy, upper-middle class families I run into now and again, insular and self-satisfied.  Standing in line for the next Apple bauble is to me a symbol of the worst sort of  meaningless U.S. conformity.

Apple’s “progressive” image, particularly its support of higher education, is in fact more assumed than real. Apple is a corporation that, like most other corporations, has taken full advantage of tax loopholes to maximize profits. Ironically, then, as Apple was busily promoting its products as harbingers of  “the next chapter in learning,” it was busily using  the ““Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” to strip mine government budgets for its shareholders.

Posted in: Writing

Boehner’s Slush

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“Students and families are struggling in President Obama’s economy. Nearly half of college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and laws like ObamaCare have only made it harder for small businesses to hire them. That’s why House Republicans voted to extend current student loan rates and to pay for it by eliminating an ObamaCare slush fund President Obama himself proposed cutting from his budget. It’s time for the president and Democrats in Congress to stop exploiting the challenges facing young Americans for political gain, and start working with Republicans to create a better environment for private-sector job growth.”

Apr 27, 2012, Press Release from the Office of the Speaker of the House, John Boehner

There’s seems to be an emerging consensus that the first presidential election after the Citizen’s United ruling, which unleashed a flood of corporate money, is going to be the ugliest in history. Apparently, if you have an endless flow of cash you won’t use it to educate and inform. I think, then, that we should start keeping track of the key terms of the vitriol. Maybe a little knowledge can diffuse the toxins. Boehner sounded angry and out of control but his terms are clearly carefully chosen to create a particular effect.

First on my list is the term “slush fund,” particularly as associated with the word “ObamaCare,” which has long been a term of art in Republican rhetoric. The two are closely related. “ObamaCare,” suggests that the Healthcare Reform Act is nothing  but the product of a single (Black) man’s power and ambition and not the democratic process; it echos Medicare, too, which “everyone knows” is on the verge of collapse.  This is designed to give these limited market reforms the air of wasteful and dangerous despotism.

It all hints of high taxes and imminent threats to liberty, paranoid mainstays of the Tea Party. The term “slush fund” makes sense, then, because it suggests another truism: absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s an ugly, slithering word that’s reptilian if not evil. It’s a deeply Orwellian trope, too, because Boehner is talking about money designated for preventative care programs, the very programs that will cut medical costs and so help businesses, large and small, while preventing suffering and disease.

The main goal seems to be to give any attempt at reform– the Healthcare Reform Act is by no means a revolutionary act–an ugly, even dangerous feeling. Ironically, this sort of rhetoric is itself a kind of political preventive care, an attempt to inoculate public discussion against the possibility of substantive change.  It’s both tactical and strategic. It’s a tactic to defeat a minor change in tax policy but, more importantly, it’s a long-term strategy for forestalling a feared redistribution of wealth.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Writing