Year: 2016

Charter School Fail

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In a bit of news that should surprise no one, it turns out that charter school students do slightly worse later in life than public school students:

Charter school boosters have many arguments in favor of fostering a publicly-financed, privately run parallel education system. But at the end of the day, their model should help kids learn more, perform better, get good jobs and earn a higher salary than they might have otherwise, right?

By that metric, it appears that Texas’ charter schools have failed, according to a large-scale study of kids from the K-12 system through early adulthood.

The analysis was conducted by Will Dobbie, an assistant professor at Princeton, and Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who in recent years helped Houston ISD adopt charter school methods (you might also remember his name from research on Houston’s police-involved shootings). It uses data from Texas state agencies that tracks student achievement and demographics from primary school, through college, and on to the labor market.

Texas is the ideal laboratory for this kind of study. It introduced charter schools way back in 1995, and they now enroll 3.5 percent of the public school population. The schools have thus had time to refine their methods and work out some kinks, while their students have had time to test their mettle in the labor market.

< The findings: On average, charter schools have no meaningful effect on test scores or employment, and actually have a slight negative impact on earnings. The results are slightly better for so-called “no excuses” charters, which feature stricter discipline and extended instructional hours — they increased test scores and four-year college enrollment and had no effect on earnings. Regular charter schools boosted two-year college enrollment, but depressed test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings.

The idea behind charter schools has always been that unleashing the market on education will create amazing result.

It has been about as effective as the idea of “Unleashing Chiang” (Kai Shek) on the communists in mainland China was.

You can read the full study here.

Linkage

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 Do try this at home, but kids should make sure that your parents are there:

Am I the Only Who Sees Fail Written All Over This?

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NASA is looking at handing operations of its space station to private business in the next decade:

NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”

The timing fits with the end of The U.S. Government’s current funding of the ISS program, which was extended by President Obama’s administration from its original deorbiting date of 2016 through 2020. Operations were prolonged through 2024 to help give NASA a platform from which to run its near-Earth preparatory missions leading up to the ultimate manned mission to Mars.

If this works as well as the privatization of British rail, I would be very surprised.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!? Trillions of Dollars?

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An auditor has found that the US Army has engaged in trillions of dollars in dodgy spending:

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

………

The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.

The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension.

I’m beginning to think that we will need to experience something akin to the sinking of the Vasa in 1628 (which led to the creation of the progenitor of the Swedish defense procurement agency, the FMV) before we end up with a defense procurement system that actually works.

This is Getting Insane

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We are now scrambling jets to defend its allies in Syria against the Assad regime:

U.S. fighter jets scrambled to eastern Syria this week when Syrian bombers attacked in the vicinity of American and coalition Special Operations forces working with Kurdish and Arab opposition fighters, the Pentagon said Friday.

The unprecedented incident, near the Syrian city of Hasakah, did not result in a direct confrontation or any injury to U.S. or coalition forces.

But it illustrated the increasingly tense and ambiguous Syrian battlefield, where aircraft and ground troops from multiple countries — with multiple agendas and loyalties — are fighting overlapping wars.

Following the initial Thursday incident, the coalition began “actively patrolling the airspace nearby,” a Defense Department official said. Early Friday, “two Syrian SU-24 aircraft attempted to transit the area and were met by coalition fighter aircraft,” which “encouraged” the Syrians to depart “without further incident,” said the official, who spoke on a Pentagon-imposed condition of anonymity.

The Syrian military, engaged in a five-year civil conflict, has generally given a wide berth to U.S. aircraft targeting the Islamic State, as have Russian jets aiding their Syrian ally. But local fighters being assisted by U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground are often opposed to both the Islamic State and the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

………

Marine Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway said that the Syrian strikes targeted Kurdish forces in Hasakah on Thursday. Social-media reports indicated that several Kurds were killed in the bombing.

U.S. forces initially contacted Russia, using “deconfliction” channels established to ensure that Russian and U.S. planes over Syria avoid each other, but were told that the bombers in question were not Russian. Ground forces received no response to attempts to contact the planes through a recognized radio channel.

The United States then launched a “combat air patrol,” Rankine-Galloway said. It arrived in the area as the Syrian Su-24 ground-attack aircraft were leaving. While he would not specify from where the U.S. aircraft were launched, the United States maintains a contingent of F-15 fighter jets at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

So, now the Syrians are bombing the Kurds.

My guess is that this is a result of the recent Turkish and Russian rapprochement:  The Turks see any form of Kurdish state as an existential threat to their state, and so the Syrian attacks on Kurdish positions are likely an artifact of this.

The US is clearly unamused by this development, since there are reports that fighters sent to intercept the Syrian aircraft was an F-22, probably because they were concerned about Syrian and Russian SAMs.

The US forces are in a bit of a bind though, because the Turks are implacably opposed to any Kurdish autonomous regions.

The only way the US wins this game is not to play.

Pass the Popcorn

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First, we have Trump’s campaign manager turfed out in large part because of his lobbying dealings with the former President of the Ukraine.

Now we have a The Podesta Group, founded by Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and run by his brother Tony Podesta, lawyering up over their involvement with the same corrupt dirtbag:

A prominent D.C. lobbying firm has hired outside counsel over revelations that it may have been improperly involved in lobbying on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians who also employed former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As first reported by BuzzFeed, the Podesta Group announced Friday that it has retained law firm Caplin & Drysdale to investigate whether or not the lobbying firm unwittingly did work for the pro-Russian political party in Europe that also hired Manafort.

“Unwittingly” my ass.

………

Working on behalf of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, the Podesta Group lobbied in Washington for positions favored by the pro-Russian political party, of which deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych was a member. The lobbying work ended in 2014 after Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia, where he remains in exile.

The problem here, as it often is in the world of lobbying, is not what is illegal, but what is legal.

Manafort and Podesta are peas in a pod that only differ in their client list.

Wait ……… Who is Calling the EpiPen Manufacturer Vultures?

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The manufacturer of the EpiPen, Mylan pharmaceuticals, has been raising the price of the pens by 15% every 6 months for years.

It’s gotten so bad that pharmaBro Martin Shrelki has just called the company vultures:

A growing chorus is calling on the Mylan pharmaceutical company to justify its price hikes on EpiPens, a potentially life-saving medication for children and others facing fatal allergies that has little real competition.

In 2007, a two-pack of the epinephrine-filled devices went for $56.64 wholesale, according to data gathered by Connecture, a health insurance data specialist. Now it’s jumped to $365.16, an increase of 544.77 percent. Since the end of 2013, the price has gone up by 15 percent every other quarter.

Doctors, parents, patients, and a former presidential candidate are speaking out on social media — and negative comments are filling up Mylan’s Facebook page following an NBCNews.com story Wednesday.

………

Even Martin Shkreli, the disgraced former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, has weighed in.

“These guys are really vultures. What drives this company’s moral compass?” he told NBC News in a phone interview.

In 2015, Shkreli famously jacked up the price of Turing’s malaria and HIV medicine Darapim overnight, from $13.50 to $750, a move that earned him a grilling by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in February — and the nickname “Pharma Bro” for his seemingly carefree attitude toward affordable medication.

Our model of pharmaceutical production and research and development is fundamentally broken.

We have expanded IP protections on drugs over the past 40 years, and what we have seen is that drugs have become less affordable, and efforts of the drug companies have moved from cures to finding ways to evergreen those IP protections.

About F%$#ing Time

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A federal judge has referred Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to federal prosecutors for a criminal invistagation:

A federal judge on Friday referred Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his second-in-command for criminal prosecution, finding that they ignored and misrepresented to subordinates court orders designed to keep the sheriff’s office from racially profiling Latinos.

In making the referral to the United States attorney’s office for criminal contempt charges, Judge G. Murray Snow of Federal District Court in Phoenix delivered the sharpest rebuke against Mr. Arpaio, who as the long-serving sheriff in Maricopa County made a name for himself as an unrelenting pursuer of undocumented immigrants.

Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan “have a history of obfuscation and subversion of this court’s orders that is as old as this case,” Judge Snow wrote in his order.

Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Sheridan had also made numerous false statements under oath, Judge Snow wrote, and “there is also probable cause to believe that many if not all of the statements were made in an attempt to obstruct any inquiry into their further wrongdoing or negligence.”

The referral does not mean the sheriff will face criminal charges; it is up to federal prosecutors to decide whether to pursue the case. Still, if the prosecutors do not take the case, the judge could appoint a special prosecutor.

He needs to be tried, and given his record, he needs to held without bail while the case is adjudicated, because it’s clear based on his record that he will do everything within his power to obstruct any investigation of his activities.

If there any justice in the world, he would be kept in his own jail.

This Is Unbelievably Sensible, and Will Never Be Implimented

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The Stimson Center has issued a report saying that maintaining deployed nuclear weapons on NATO basis is stupid and dangerous:

The U.S. government is strengthening its nuclear-deterrent posture to reassure allies in Europe, and is moving forward on a number of programs to modernize its arsenal. But last-minute questions are being raised about whether Washington should rethink the use of B61 tactical warheads in Europe, for both strategic and budgetary reasons. On Aug. 1, the National Nuclear Security Administration revealed that it has initiated a B61 refurbishment program, authorizing the start of production engineering, with production to follow from 2020-25. The effort will extend the lives of about 480 B61 warheads, some of which will be based in Europe.

But why, argues nuclear disarmament expert Barry Blechman, cofounder of the Stimson Center. In a new report, he says it is unlikely NATO allies would ever use a nuclear weapon. Predicted advances in Russian and Chinese air defenses are expected to keep tactical fighters at bay. And security for the warheads is costly and problematic. For example, during the recent failed military coup in Turkey, B61s were left at a base without electricity and whose commander was arrested. Blechman says the U.S. should stop buying B61s for use on tactical fighters and remove them altogether from Europe.

The bombs are don’t serve any tactical purpose these days, if they ever did, as as the failed Turkish coup demonstrates, when Incirlik airbase was literally left in the dark after power was cut, they create a real risk of the loss of a nuclear weapon.

The modernization program is  a waste of money that makes us less safe.

Sh%$ I Don’t Care About

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Musical chairs amongst the hired guns at political campaigns.

I get it: Paul Manafort, Trump’s now-former campaign manager has resigned.

This is definitely news, and it should be covered by normal news sources.  (I am not a news source, I am an essayist whose writing is driven by lazy thinking, dubious sourcing sourcing, and the worst writing on the internet™.)

I just don’t think that it should be page 1 news, even below the fold on a slow news day:  It’s just inside baseball.

Interesting Take-Away on “Fixing” Obamacare

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Over at Naked Capitalism, a commenter makes a long and detailed post about Aetna and its pulling out of the exchanges. He ends with this:

Finally, two important take-aways from this. First, there is nothing in ObamaCare for Hillary’s “incrementalism” to address. It is simply too broken for even the industry’s master to deal with. Second, much as they tried, the Republicans did NOT kill ObamaCare. Capitalism did.

I think that this is an accurate description of the problems inherent in the system.

He also states that he was familiar, though not necessarily involved, in discussions on the “Public Option”, and that it was not killed as a sop to the insurers and big pharma, but because it it could not be made to work in the way that the Obama administration wanted it to, which was to screw sick people without making it too obvious:

………The public option (and this comes from as close to an insider as you’ll ever likely have) was put in as a dumping ground for the pre-existing conditions that the insurers didn’t want. It was in effect a high risk pool by another name, because “high risk pool” would make ObamaCare sound too much like car insurance, not a good selling point for sure. The problem was how to get high risk claimants into the public option without using the words pre-existing conditions. Could their actuaries identify these people by other criteria in a close enough fashion to where the math would still work out (i.e., where profit was still there). As time wore on, it became clear that this simply was not going to be possible, at least not to a level that was close enough to make the idea work.

This narrative makes sense to me, since most of Obama’s initiatives in the area of regulation and the roll of government have been directed toward privatizing profits and socializing losses. (He is very much a Chicago school kind of guy)

It’s a cogent critique which boils down to:  If you want healthcare to work in a profit driven marketplace, you can’t.

Of course the Teabaggers out there will have a different take, which is that Obamacare was designed to fail to force us into single payer, which would turn all of us into Kenyan Muslim Communists., but Teabaggers believe that markets can never fail, that they can only be failed.

This is Angela Merkel Desperately Trying to Salvage Her Electoral Chances

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Frau Merkel* has signed onto a proposal to ban face veils from public places in Germany:

Europe’s battle over public attire for Muslim women moved on Friday from the outcry over banning “burkinis” in France to a strong call from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing conservative bloc for a ban in Germany on face veils in schools and universities and while driving.

The German proposal, announced by the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, was clearly driven by an intensifying political season and a surge in support for the far right since Germany accepted more than a million refugees last year. There has been mounting public anxiety over integrating the refugees, who are mostly from Muslim countries, particularly after a series of terrorist assaults and a gun rampage last month.

………

Yet the proposals now being floated in Germany around restricting the burqa make it clear that France is not the only European country grappling with whether some Islamic coverings amount to a barrier to the full participation of women in Western society.

Ms. Merkel had sent a signal about the partial ban on face veils on Thursday, when she told a group of provincial newspapers that “from my standpoint, a fully veiled woman scarcely has a chance at full integration in Germany.”

Mr. de Maizière said the same day that “the burqa doesn’t fit with our country and does not correspond to our understanding of the role of women.”
Continue reading the main story

Mr. de Maizière and Ms. Merkel stopped short of calling for an outright ban on the burqa, but the proposal put forward on Friday tiptoes along a path that the French traveled down with a 2010 law that barred any covering that hides the face.

………

The German plan would not ban shawls or abayas that cover the body and are often worn with a hijab, a head scarf that does not cover the face, which German officials acknowledge would not win approval from the country’s constitutional court.

It would ban full face veils in schools and colleges, and while driving, appearing before courts or at public registry offices, or when going through passport control. Women who want to wear a face veil in public should not teach or become civil servants, Mr. de Maizière said in announcing the plan on morning television.

“We want to make it a legal requirement to show your face in places where that is necessary for the cohesion of our society,” he said.

He was flanked by the conservative leaders of two states with elections next month — Lorenz Caffier of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Frank Henkel of the city-state of Berlin. Both men are running on strong law-and-order platforms and had called for a ban on veils.

This is all about the elections.

Merkel has managed to burn through a lot of good will from the German electorate with her handling of the Syrian refugee crisis, and this is an attempt at damage control.

*Horses whinnying.

Linkage

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They got the voice wrong, but it is still brilliant:

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

A Good Start

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The Department of Justice has announced that it will be ending its use of private prisons:

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

 Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

 “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

Note that this only applies to federal prisons run by the DoJ, not state and local prisons or immigrant detention facilities maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

As to whether this policy will move quickly enough, my guess is that we’ll have to wait for the next President.
Memo after the break.

Snark of the Day ……… Week ……… Month ……… Year ……… Decade ……… Century ……… Mellenium

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The anarchist group INDECLINE decided that they need to show that the emperor had no clothes, with said emperor being Donald J. Trump.

To do this, they erected 5 naked sculptures of him all across the nation: (This is amusing, but not truly great snark)

For much of the past year, Donald Trump proved uniquely untouchable, a political force of such mind-boggling invulnerability that he even bragged about attracting voters after hypothetically shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.

Hoping to strip away the Teflon Don’s legendary confidence to reveal the fleshy mortal beneath the expensive suits and long ties, members of the anarchist collective INDECLINE decided they would showcase the aspirant president in the most humiliating way they could imagine: without his clothes.

The group unveiled life-size statues of Trump in the nude Thursday morning in public spaces in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Seattle.

“The Emperor Has No B—s,” [Balls because WaPo is too chickensh%$ to say it] as the project is called, arrives several months after the group covered stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with the names of African Americans who have been killed by police. In the past, the collective has also claimed responsibility for an anti-Trump “Rape” mural on the U.S.-Mexico border and a massive piece of graffiti art in California’s Mojave Desert.

Yes, this is amusing, but it still isn’t great nark.

The great snark was from the New York City Parks Department, which promptly removed the statue, and a spokesman explained their reasoning as follows:

NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small.

Brilliant! 

You win the internet.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

How Utterly Proper

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Hillary Clinton has selected right wing pro-fracking pro TPP DINO Ken Salazar to head her transition team:

Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking.

He said this:

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

He is ignoring many cases of contaminated water, including some cases where the water would burn.

And he claims that there is not one single case of a problem.

As interior secretary, he was waiving environmental reviews for BP project as its as its Deepwater Horizon was still spewing thousands of barrels a day in to the Gulf of Mexico,

And this ratf%$# will be vetting her staff, which means that in a very real way, he will have more impact on the shape of her administration than anyone but her.

If you think that Clinton is a progressive, I have some of Donald Trump’s debt to sell you.

WalMart Doesn’t Just F%$# the Taxpayer Over Welfare, Medicaid, and Foodstamps

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It also deliberately avoids engaging in actions that might reduce drime so as to put the load on the local police as well:

………

 Police chiefs and their officers on the ground say that’s just not so. Ross likes to joke that the concentration of crime at Walmart makes his job easier. “I’ve got all my bad guys in one place,” he says, flashing a bright smile. His squad’s sergeant, Robert Rohloff, a 34-year police veteran who has to worry about staffing, budgets, and patrolling the busiest commercial district in Tulsa, says there’s nothing funny about Walmart’s impact on public safety. He can’t believe, he says, that a multibillion-dollar corporation isn’t doing more to stop crime. Instead, he says, it offloads the job to the police at taxpayers’ expense. “It’s ridiculous—we are talking about the biggest retailer in the world,” says Rohloff. “I may have half my squad there for hours.”

 Walmart knows police departments are frustrated. “We absolutely understand how important this is. It is important for our associates, it is important for our customers and across the communities we serve,” says Judith McKenna, Walmart’s chief operating officer for the U.S. “We can do better.”

 But when? That’s what law enforcement around the country wants to know. “The constant calls from Walmart are just draining,” says Bill Ferguson, a police captain in Port Richey, Fla. “They recognize the problem and refuse to do anything about it.”

 There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart. It’s the direct, if unintended, result of corporate policy. Beginning as far back as 2000, when former CEO Lee Scott took over, an aggressive cost-cutting crusade led many stores to deteriorate. The famed greeters were removed, taking away a deterrent to theft at the porous entrances and exits. Self-checkout scanners replaced many cashiers. Walmart added stores faster than it hired employees. The company has one worker for every 524 square feet of retail space, a 19 percent increase in space per employee from a decade ago.

 ………

 Police departments inevitably compare their local Walmarts with Target stores. Target, Walmart’s largest competitor, is a different kind of retail business, with mostly smaller stores that tend to be located in somewhat more affluent neighborhoods. But there are other reasons Targets have less crime. Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. Like Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.

 “Target doesn’t have these problems,” says Ferguson. “Part of it may be the lower prices at Walmart or where Walmart is located, but when I walk into Target I see uniformed security or someone walking around up front. You see no one at Walmart. It just seems like an easy target.” A Target spokeswoman declined to comment on the two companies’ security policies.

 ………

 Dennis Buckley found a way to get Walmart moving faster on crime: shaming and threats. A blunt former fire chief, Buckley is the mayor of Beech Grove, Ind., an Indianapolis suburb with a population of 14,000. He’d been swamped with complaints from his police chief about the daily calls to Walmart. He demanded action from Walmart’s local lawyer, as did the City Council. Nothing happened. Then, in June of last year, Buckley reached his limit. He received news that a local woman had been killed and her grandson seriously injured in a car crash caused by a Walmart shoplifter fleeing police. Later that day, he learned his town had become a laughingstock. A YouTube video of a fight at the Beech Grove Walmart was going viral. It showed two women, one riding a motorized scooter, the other accompanied by a 6-year-old boy, in a furious fistfight that turned into a profane wrestling match in the shampoo aisle. The video also contained glimpses of jeering bystanders recording the action on their phones. By the time Buckley saw the video, it had been viewed millions of times.

 Enraged by the circus atmosphere around the video, he denounced Walmart on Facebook and in the local media. “The Beech Grove Walmart is NOT a good corporate partner,” he posted. The YouTube video “was embarrassing to the City of Beech Grove and the people who live in our beautiful city. Walmart should be ashamed of itself once again for failing to control the people who enter their store.”

 Regional Walmart executives asked for a meeting with Buckley and Craig Wiley, the city attorney. “You could tell by their body language that they came to the meeting with a very conciliatory tone, and they were going to get their arms around the problem,” Wiley says. Walmart promised to hire security and extend a fence on the rear of its property, which barred an easy exit for shoplifters into a retirement community. It said it would skip calling the cops for first-time offenders shoplifting merchandise valued below $50 if the shoplifter completes the company’s theft-prevention program.

 Buckley was pleased. But in the weeks following the meeting, Walmart dragged its heels. Buckley went public again, this time appearing on national cable news. “Walmart Beech Grove is draining our police resources,” he told Fox Business Network. “It’s the string of terrible events that have been occurring down there over the past two months that have led me to instruct our police chief to declare the Walmart a public nuisance.”

 That meant the threat of a $2,500 fine for every call to the police. Walmart now pays for off-duty police to man the store, and the pressure on the local police has eased. A year later, Buckley is pleased, but it still irks him that he had to go to such measures to get Walmart to act. “Cities really need to put their thumb down and get them to the table,” he says. “It’s taken a long time, but they can really be good partners if they want to be.”

(emphasis mine)

Yet another reason to avoid the stores.

For many years their business model has been to suck the marrow out of society for profit, and I do not see this changing.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

How Many Times Does This Lie Have to Be Disproved?

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Time and time again, when arguing for outsourcing and skill based immigration programs like H1B and L1A programs, business argue that there are simply not enough skilled workers in the US.

Time and time again, these claims have proved to be complete fabrications:

For years, employers, pundits and policymakers alike have bemoaned the lack of qualified workers available to fill vacant manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Despite the prominence of the skills-gap debate, a new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in labor economics and workforce policy finds that the demand for higher-level skills in U.S. manufacturing jobs is generally modest.

Three-quarters of U.S. manufacturing plants show no sign of hiring difficulties for open positions, says new research from Andrew Weaver, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

“Not a week goes by without someone declaring that a huge skills gap exists in the U.S. workforce,” he said. “A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic, but it’s frequently without evidence. The popular sentiment encourages people to think that employers have high skill demands, but U.S. workers just aren’t up to snuff, and that’s why manufacturing work is being outsourced overseas.”

However, the results show that U.S. manufacturers are generally able to hire the skilled workers they seek.

“We estimate an upper bound of job vacancies due to a potential skills gap of 16 to 25 percent of manufacturing establishments – a finding that sharply contrasts with other surveys that have reported figures of more than 60-70 percent,” Weaver said.

It’s not that business cannot find appropriately skilled employees, it’s that they don’t want to pay them a fair market wage, and so they try importing workers and exporting jobs.

Metadata Fail

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California State Assemblyman Adam Gray demanded an expensive and potential paralyzing audit of the California Air Resources Board, in what was a blatant attempt to hamstring the organization.

Environmentalists, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together, suggested that he was doing the bidding of lobbyists.

Mr. Gray denied that he was carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, but it turns out that not only was he metaphorically carrying their water, he was literally carrying their letter.

Metadata from the document showed that it had been drafted by a lobbyist:

………

“I think the environmentalists are going to point you over here and say he’s taking oil money, he’s trying to block the program,” Gray said in an interview. “I’m not trying to block the program. I’m for fighting climate change.”

But in pushing for the audit, Gray got a big assist from the oil industry. The industry’s main lobbyist wrote the request.

Metadata in the Microsoft Word document in the draft request obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that its author is Eloy Garcia. Garcia is the lead lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Assn. or WSPA, which represents oil companies in Sacramento.



The letter that Gray and more than a dozen other lawmakers sent to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on Aug. 4 was word for word the same as Garcia’s draft.

First, Adam Gray is completely, and most deservedly, owned.

Second, how many times does this have to happen before people get a clue? 

Information on removing the metadata is a quick Google search away.