Posts Tagged ‘right to organize’
Everything Is Terrible Tuesday Links
* The Department of Defense has finally admitted it lost enough money in Iraq to fund 6 EPAs. Who could have predicted packing $100 bills into untracked pallets would turn out badly?
* Lots of climate change news today. The 1981-2000 January temperature average is officially a full degree warmer than the 1971-2000 average. The media won’t connect wildfires to rising temperatures. The twenty-first century as a century of disasters.
* More good news: here comes water scarcity.
* It looks like a CIA agent will take the fall for higher-ups be indicted for war crimes related to torture at Abu Ghraib.
* And right-wingers on the Wisconsin Supreme Court steal another one for the plutocrats in ruling that the state’s Open Meetings Law doesn’t apply to the legislature. Of course it doesn’t.
Thursday! Wisconsin, Optical Illusions, the Death of the Public University, and More
* Some genuinely breaking news: Wisconsin’s anti-union bill was just struck down for violating the state’s open meetings law.
* …the curious thing about this report is that it dances around policy questions, but doesn’t ask a single one directly, or name a single policy that has shaped the higher education landscape. “The public” is asked to confine its thoughts to individual success; “college presidents” are asked to ruminate on the mission of college. But the two are never articulated as part of the same system, or as having a mutual set of interests that are social and organically intertwined. And this, I would argue, is because neoliberal government policies, and right-wing political demagoguery, have sold the ideology of “low taxes” and “small government” so successfully that the moral commitment of the state to nurture an educated citizenry has entirely evaporated from the equation.
* Ohio hates John Kasich. But GOP voters love Herman Cain; he’s outpolling Pawlenty now, and nearly tied with Gingrich and Ron Paul.
* Steve Benen notes that Jon Huntsman is so liberal he could probably be a credible candidate in the Democratic primary in 2016. As I noted on Twitter the sad thing is that’s really as strong an argument against Democrats as it is for Huntsman.
* And just a little bit of awesome: your optical illusions of the year.
Four for Thursday
* Study estimates that illegal immigrants paid $11.2B in taxes last year, unlike GE, which paid zero.
* Wis. Dems To File Recall Signatures Against A Fifth Republican State Senator.
* Major hydrofracking spill in Pennsylvania.
* Related: BP Ready To Resume Oil Spilling.
LONDON—A year after the tragic explosion and oil spill that caused petroleum giant BP to cease operations in the Gulf of Mexico, the company announced Wednesday that it was once again ready to begin oil spilling. “People said this company might never rebound from last year, but we’re here and ready to do what we do best,” said BP chief executive Robert Dudley, who confirmed that the company had already successfully conducted small test spills and that full-scale spilling operations could resume as early as July. “We’ve reorganized and regrouped, and now we’re ready to put the faulty blowout preventers on the wellheads and watch them pump raw crude petroleum right into the environment.” BP stock jumped $14 a share following the announcement.
Thursday Links
* A major aftershock has hit Japan, a 7.4. The tsunami warning originally issued has been lifted, which should limit the damage. I hope that country gets a break soon.
* Democrats are filing papers to recall a second GOP state senator in Wisconsin. Guys, collect them all!
* Now Alec Baldwin wants five more years of 30 Rock. Just not with him on it.
* My Student, the ‘Terrorist.’
* Ursula K. Le Guin: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
* And the Independent has your list of fifty books every eleven-year-old should read.
Wednesday!
* Now she’s just showing off: Duke’s own Julia Gaffield has found a second copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. I’m in that dissertation working group, by the way, so at least half the glory is mine. At least half.
* Ian Sales celebrates SF “mistressworks.” There’s a 91-book version here, on which Xenogenesis is still inexcusably absent.
* What happened to the peace movement?
* Huge turnout in the special election last night for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Right now the race is too close to call, with pro-labor candidate JoAnne Kloppenburg up by just a few hundred votes.
* Glenn Beck fired “transitioned off.”
* Alec Baldwin says next season of 30 Rock will be the last. NBC disagrees.
* And just coming over the wire: Donald Trump is as awesomely incompetent at politics as he is at business. I can’t wait for 2012.
How We as a Profession Have Been Selfish, Foolish, Mean-Spirited and Short-Sighted
Five lessons from Wisconsin, from Marc Bousquet.
1. Tenure must unite the faculty, not divide it. The single most corrosive faculty myth to emerge since 1970 is the ludicrous notion that tenure is a merit badge for faculty with research-intensive appointments. The biggest reason higher education unions are powerless is that we’ve allowed administrations to cast the overwhelming majority of faculty on teaching-intensive appointments out of the tenure system: “Oh, they’re not real professors, they teach in a less prestigious university/just undergraduates/in the lower division/community colleges.”
Compare this pathetic, near-total collapse of professional identity, much less of solidarity, to the response of police and fire unions in Wisconsin, who defied the governor to support other public employees not even in their own professions–even when he exempted their unions from the axe.
Friday Night Links
* A judge has suspended Wisconsin’s anti-union law pending on process grounds. The state attorney general has already appealed.
* Yet the president, with this brief set of remarks, has crafted something of an Obama Doctrine for military intervention: The United States will join in a multilateral fight for democracy and humanitarian aims when it is in the nation’s interest and when the locals are involved and desire US participation. But perhaps we can shorten this: The United States will join in a multilateral fight for democracy and humanitarian aims when it is in the nation’s interest and when the locals are involved and desire US participation. How Obama turned on a dime toward war. But hold the phone! Congressional Republicans, fastidious prisoners to moral and procedural consistency, say Obama will need an official declaration of war.
* How close is your home to a nuclear power plant? Durham, you’re just 24 miles from Shearon Harris, whose spent fuel pools continue to raise alarms. But don’t worry; Dr. Coulter says radiation is good for you.
* A preposterous waste of time: Slate wants your ideas on what can be done to contain radiation at the damaged plant. We realize that this isn’t the sort of question that naturally calls out for wisdom-of-the-crowds treatment. But for every hour thatactual nuclear engineers are unable to put an end to the crisis—or at least keep it from getting worse—creative and unconventional solutions look more attractive. At the end of this Hive Mind project, we’ll consult nuclear experts on the viability of the most popular ideas.
* Crooked Timber on the attempt to close the philosophy department at Keele in the U.K.
I think the tendencies are clear. If you are teaching/doing research in a field/discipline that can not easily show (quantitatively, please!) to policy makers & bureaucrats that you will make a significant positive contribute to economic growth, your very existence is at stake. Never mind that you’re opening up minds, teaching logic or the arts, passing on history to the next generations. Either someone on the market should be willing to pay for what you’re doing, or else you are at mercy of the benevolence of your government.
* Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage.’
* And from the MetaFilter archives: “…the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up.”
Monday Night Links
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the risk from spent fuel, which is still being debated. There’s also this from Wisconsin: Senate Democrats will continue to be held in contempt despite having returned to the state. This means, among other things, that they won’t be able to vote in committee meetings…
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* Now all three reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are experiencing severe coolant problems; an explosion has now occurred at Unit 2 which seems as though it may be the most dangerous yet. This is now a level 5 accident, with much speculation about the extent to which government and industry sources are covering up the full extent of the disaster. A MetaFilter commenter claims that one hour at Daiichi is now equal to three years of exposure to normal background radiation. Kate Sheppard has more. Turns out the first warning about the vulnerability of these reactors was released in 1972.
* So much for all that new nuclear energy we were going to build.
* Pictures of the devastation in Japan from the Big Picture and In Focus.
* A little good news: Wisconsin Democrats have already collected 45% of the signatures necessary to trigger a recall.
* Republican state legislators have been really testing the bottom lately for what is sayable in public; the New Hampshire legislator who endorsed death for the mentally handicapped should “die in Siberia” will resign. Next up: A Kansas state representative who says we should shoot undocumented immigrants “like feral hogs.” But don’t worry:
Asked about his comment, Peck was unapologetic. “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person,” he said.
Oh, okay, that’s totally fine then.
* And in science fiction news: Babies with three parents could be just a year away.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin
…Dane County officials filed a lawsuit Friday to immediately block the signed bill from being published and taking the force of law, arguing that legislators hadn’t followed the law in passing the bill.
Dane County Circuit Judge Amy Smith ruled that the county did not meet the standard for a temporary restraining order, which calls for the plaintiff to show there would be irreparable harm if the bill is published and becomes law. But Smith ordered the county and the state to come back to court on Wednesday for a hearing on a temporary injunction to block the bill.
…
The county contends there was not adequate public notice at a legislative committee meeting where an amended version of the budget-repair bill was passed on Wednesday. The suit also alleges that the state Senate did not have enough members on hand to legally vote on the bill later that same day.
‘Who Killed Science Fiction?’ and a Few More
* We’re so screwed: one foot in sea level rise projected by 2050.
* Cyber-utopia has been called off: Despite all the heady social theorizing of Shirky and the Wired set, the web has not, in fact, abolished the conventions of market value or rewritten the rules of productivity and worker reward. It has, rather, merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors like Chris Anderson, who plagiarized some of the content of Free, a celebration of the digital free-content revolution and its steady utopian progress toward uncompensated cultural production, from the generous crowdsourcing souls at Wikipedia. How egalitarian. It’s a sad truth that in Shirky’s idealized market order, some people’s time remains more valuable than others’, and as in that gray, old labor-based offline economy, the actual producers of content routinely get cheated, in the case of Free by the very charlatan who urges them on to ever greater feats of generosity.
As for crowdsourcing being a “labor of love” (Shirky primly reminds us that the term “amateur” “derives from the Latin amare—‘to love’”), the governing metaphor here wouldn’t seem to be digital sharecropping so much as the digital plantation. For all too transparent reasons of guilt sublimation, patrician apologists for antebellum slavery also insisted that their uncompensated workers loved their work, and likewise embraced their overseers as virtual family members. This is not, I should caution, to brand Shirky as a latter-day apologist for slavery but rather to note that it’s an exceptionally arrogant tic of privilege to tell one’s economic inferiors, online or off, what they do and do not love, and what the extra-material wellsprings of their motivation are supposed to be. To use an old-fashioned Enlightenment construct, it’s at minimum an intrusion into a digital contributor’s private life—even in the barrier-breaking world of Web 2.0 oversharing and friending. The just and proper rejoinder to any propagandist urging the virtues of uncompensated labor from an empyrean somewhere far above mere “society” is, “You try it, pal.” See also: John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism:
But this collaborative potential, arguably the democratic genius of the Internet, runs up against the pressure of capital to consolidate monopoly power, create artificial scarcity, and erect fences wherever possible. At nearly every turn, industries connected to the Internet have transitioned from competitive to oligopolistic in short order.
* Wisconsin Dispute Could Mobilize Democratic Base. Gee, you think?
* How I Passed My U.S. Citizenship Test By Keeping the Right Answers to Myself. Via MeFi.
* Worldwide university rankings. I’m sure it’s killing the Duke admins that they don’t constitute one of the eight globally recognized superbrands.
* And a great find from somewhere or another: Earl Kemp’s Who Killed Science Fiction?
Anybody who announces that he is a science fiction writer is announcing that he is in damn bad company financially and artistically.
Oh Kurt, say you don’t mean it!
Recall Everyone
Graeme Zielinski, a spokesman for the party, tells me that activists working on the recall push already collected over the weekend 15 percent of the total necessary signatures needed to force recalls in all eight of the GOP districts Dems are targeting. He says that the party — which is helping to coordinate and keeping track of outside efforts to gather signatures — set itself a goal of 10,000 signatures for the weekend, and has already exceeded it by 35 percent.
Zielinski also claims that recall forces over the weekend put more than 2,000 volunteers on the street to collect signatures. He also says volunteers have collected 26 percent of the signatures required in one district, and 20 percent in another, though he wouldn’t say which ones, because Dems want GOP senators to fret that they are the ones in question. If you like, you can donate towards the recall effort though Daily Kos’s page here.
Gerry Canavan 