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Leo W. Gerard: The Gift America Needs Most: Manufacturing

2009-12-22T12:41:01Z

In Columbus Ohio, a 5-year-old girl jumped onto Santa's lap last month and asked if he could give her dad a job as an elf.

Mike Smith, who works the Santa station at the Polaris Fashion Place in Columbus, asked why, the Wall Street Journal reported. The little girl in the Dora the Explorer sweatshirt responded:

"Because my daddy's out of work, and we're about to lose our house."

Happy Holidays America.

The gift this country needs most this holiday season is an economy built on a solid foundation, one that will provide middle class, family-supporting jobs now and into the future.

That present would not be another version of Monopoly for Wall Street wannabes. It would not be Barbie-goes-to-the-mall-credit-cards for youngsters in families already maxed out on their plastic and their mortgages.

The metaphorical gift our economy could really use is an Erector set -- a strong steel construction kit from which the intrepid manufacture airplanes, automobiles, robots on motorized tracks, backhoes, helicopters, skyscrapers, cranes, even working Ferris wheels.

That's because, most of all, this economy needs manufacturing. Enthralled by the glitz, glamour and bogus bonuses of Wall Street, we've allowed multinationals to export our grit and grimy factories overseas. Factories that made clothing, sports shoes, large appliances, tire, glass and so much more in big and small U.S. towns and transferred to China and Indonesia and India, lured not just by cheap labor, but also by lavish government subsidies and absent environmental regulations.

Manufacturing, the basis of any strong economy, has continuously declined as a percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product since its World War II peak, when it was 28.3 percent. Its new low is less than half of that -- 12 percent.

Here's the most obvious difference between an economy based on manufacturing and one based on Wall Street: You can hold the handlebars of Harley-Davidson in your hands, but just try grasping a derivative.

The paper traders on Wall Street bundle mortgages into exotic financial instruments called derivatives, sell those, buy pseudo-insurance to secure them, then engage in legal betting on whether the "instruments" will soar or fail. This kind of activity caused the financial collapse in 2008. Frankly, beyond being incredibly risky, these transactions don't create true wealth; they just generate big bonuses.

In manufacturing, an entrepreneur takes raw material and adds energy, ingenuity, tools and labor to create a product -- like steel. That has real value and can be sold on the market to someone who needs it to combine with other materials to make finished merchandise like motorcycles or refrigerators. And those manufactured items are durable and valuable.

In the process of manufacturing, many people are employed -- to get the raw materials, whether it's limestone or iron or trees, to transport it to a factory, to generate electricity to run the factory, to transform the raw material at the factory, to deliver the product to the buyer, to pave the roads and build the bridges and repair the railroads necessary for all that transportation, to design the highways and factories and overpasses, to feed all the workers lunch.

Tragically, the Great Recession caused by Wall Street has hit manufacturing hard. While unemployment is at a 25-year high of 10 percent, the unemployment in manufacturing has run a couple of percentage points higher than that. More than 2.1 million manufacturing workers have been thrown out of their jobs since the recession began in December 2007.

These workers are the parents of children in Dora-the-Explorer sweat shirts who are asking Santa for elf jobs.

These are the workers who have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments -- although almost half are suffering from depression or anxiety, a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults showed.
These are the workers who told the pollsters that the frustration and stress of unemployment has provoked conflicts and arguments with family and friends.

These are the workers who have lost their homes or have been threatened with eviction or foreclosure, who have difficulty paying bills and have resorted to borrowing money from friends and relatives. These are the workers profiled by Anne Hull of the Washington Post in a story that began by describing desperate laid off Warren, Ohio residents in a pawn shop:

"At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band."

These are workers selling their precious keepsakes to survive 15-percent unemployment in an area along the Mahoning River that once was the world's fifth-largest steel producer -- until it lost 50,000 of those family-supporting manufacturing jobs and another 11,500 middle-class jobs at the Lordstown General Motors plant all in a decade.

These workers could be holding good, steady factory jobs if the United States had implemented a manufacturing strategy, the way China, Japan, Germany, even The Netherlands did long ago.

Just last week, the Obama administration offered a gift to all those who believe in manufacturing. It is that strategy for America. Its formal name is the White House Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing.

For that five-year-old girl in the Dora the Explorer sweatshirt. For her furloughed father and her family. For the future of this country, let's give ourselves the gift of a future constructed on a solid economic foundation. Let's implement that plan to revitalize American manufacturing immediately. Millions of unemployed workers can't wait.

2000s Most Dismal Stock Market Decade In History: "WSJ"

2009-12-20T23:58:19Z

The U.S. stock market is wrapping up what is likely to be its worst decade ever.

In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.

Jeffrey Feldman: Year of the Rahm: Get 'Em, Then Gut 'Em

2009-12-19T12:06:06Z

As frustrated as the base of the Democratic Party may be in this late stage of the health care reform battle, few have reflected on the force behind every legislative battle this year: Rahm Emanuel.

In a blunt remark to the Wall Street Journal, the White House Chief of Staff tipped his hand on how he planned to get 60 votes in the Senate: bring left-wing Democrats on board early to generate enthusiasm, then turn on them in the end game to woo conservatives.

In other words: Get 'em, then gut 'em.

Responding as to whether or not the White House was concerned about "noise" from liberals, (i.e., threats that liberals will "kill" rather than vote for a health care bill that includes a mandate, but no public option), Emanuel made two very telling statements.

First, Emanuel gestured to the vote tally by saying,"There are no liberals left to get." In other words: liberal Democrats committed to supporting the White House early in the game, such that Emanuel has long since given up in interested in the concerns of those who support left-wing Democrats.

Second, and in jarring contrast to his first statement in the Wall Street Journal interview, Emanuel then blamed liberal Democrats for every failure to pass a health care bill in the past, "Every time they've gotten close to the deal, they've passed up the opportunity and chosen to walk away from a particular [sic] where they've lost the forest for the trees." By referring to the liberal Democrats as "they," Emanuel makes it clear that to bring on conservative Democrats in the Senate, he is willing to split the party into two sides: those who are working to pass a health care bill, and those with a long record of blocking a bill--us and them.

Indeed, if we recall the way the health care bill was unfolded, the White House began by wrapping their early efforts in the most liberal of liberal Democratic packages: the image of Sen. Edward Kennedy. This early phase of the debate featured liberal Democrats in the Senate as a tactic for bringing in the base and generating enthusiasm. Certainly, health care reform was also Kennedy's legacy, but in terms of political strategy Kennedy was also Emanuel's early game outreach to the liberal base.

And once he "got" liberals, Emanuel turned his attention to conservatives.

Short of Emanuel calling liberal Democrats "socialists," it is difficult to imagine a more direct attack on early supporters of his own whip effort than his inflammatory statements in the Wall Street journal. Emanuel makes it clear that, at this late stage of the game, liberal Democrats will be castigated as the killers of health care reform throughout American history, if they dare to complain about discrepancies with earlier versions of the bill.

"Get 'em early, gut 'em later" is a strategy that leads to 60 votes and a base that feels like they have been sold down the river. And, yet, it leads to 60 votes. Thus, every legislative item on the Obama White House reform agenda has passed, while the base has slowly simmered to the boiling point.

Curiously, liberal and progressive members of the Democratic Party have felt the downside of Emanuel's strategy at a visceral level, but have not yet found an effective way to make it work to their advantage.

Most liberals and progressive in the Democratic base insist that Emanuel's "get 'em early, gut 'em later" strategy will lead only to Pyrrhic policy victories for the White House: legislation so compromised that party activists refuse to turn out the vote in 2010 and 2012.

And yet, if considered from a more tactical perspective, Emanuel's Wall Street Journal interview suggests that the base of the party suffers from a fundamental weakness when it comes to legislative negotiations: liberal idealism leads the base to sign on so early to White House reform efforts, that it forfeits any subsequent role in the critical end game.

Greater end game influence for liberals and progressives, in other words, is about strategy, not ideals--tactics, not rhetoric.

Given the likelihood that elected Democrats would rather stiff arm activists in their own base than be publicly accused by their own President of blocking health care reform--meaning that the current health care bill will likely be signed into law rather than killed--what can the base of the Democratic Party do to guarantee they have more end game influence in the next legislative battle?

As painful as it may seem, the best tactics just might come from the likes of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.

Learn from Lieberman? Just reading that suggestion is enough to make most liberals want to gauge out their own eyes in horror. And who can blame them. Lieberman has become the symbol of political egotism who has stood up and blocked reform.

And yet, both Nelson and Lieberman have managed to make themselves key players in the health care end game by following a few basic tactics. They stay relatively quiet early, keep an ace in the hole (such as, anti-government spending or an anti-abortion amendment), avoid inflammatory rhetoric in favor of seeing ten steps ahead in the whip count, and finally: they have been willing to step out late in the game to hold a bill hostage no matter how loudly their constituents and the media attacked them.

All of these techniques require party activists to engage in some efforts that have not, heretofore, been their strong suits: back room planning, anticipating the details of legislative fights, cultivating reciprocal relationships on Capital Hill, a well-run ground game, keeping one's card's close, cultivating the media, and--most importantly: good end game timing.

Such a complicated effort cannot happen overnight. By Christmas next year, however, liberals and progressives in the Democratic Party would have had plenty of time to take the first steps towards greater influence in reform legislation.

If the left-wing base can stomach it--if they can learn from Emanuel, Lieberman, and Nelson rather than simply demonizing them--the long term pay off could be the Holy Grail of progressive political activism: ending a legislative battle with a feeling of political victory and a sense that they have finally pushed the party and the country towards the reform they envision.

Retooling the base will not be easy, but the alternative is a collective sense of betrayal that spirals out of control, culminating in a kind of permanent road rage at party leadership. It may seem like the right thing to do in the short run, but in the long run, that kind of anger is neither sustainable nor effective at bringing about reform.

Change, in other words, may indeed come from within--within the base--and not just from Obama.

Eric Alterman: Think Again: How to Control Health Care Costs, Conservative Style

2009-12-17T13:13:12Z

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress. With Mickey Ehrlich

It's a truism that conservatives support fiscal responsibility. Sure, the last two Republican regimes vastly increased the government's deficits, though to be perfectly accurate, George W. Bush began with a surplus, rather than a deficit. But never mind that. That was when they were actually in power. Now they're out of power and everything is back to normal. Take a look, for instance, at current arguments over the health care bill, which President Barack Obama has insisted needs to be deficit neutral to ensure that it will save money over time.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial criticized the proposed compromise legislation as an expansion of entitlements without surefire cost-control measures in place. They write: "The White House hawked a permanent entitlement expansion on flimsy and speculative theories that its own partisans now admit--albeit when it is nearly too late--aren't more substantive than the triumph of hope over experience, while simultaneously writing off the one policy that has been effective in the real world."

Ditto the Washington Post and Newsweek's Robert Samuelson, who terms the bill's spending reductions "a mirage." He claims that despite what the language of the bill may suggest, there is no chance of controlling health care spending with the current legislation. He takes issue with two progressive studies on the health care bill at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Center for American Progress. He argues that the studies' claims of reductions under the bill are actually "smaller future increases." He fails to point out, however, that expansion of coverage with slower increases in costs still amounts to a more efficient health care delivery system.

Samuelson's primary argument, however, is not against the facts of the bill or the studies of its costs, but rather that promises of spending cuts in Medicare "may not be real." He insists that, "to attack costs would be politically challenging." This ignores the reality that the very idea of enacting health care reform is politically challenging....

You can read the rest of Eric Alterman and Mickey Ehrlich's analysis in their recent article, "Think Again: How to Control Health Care Costs, Conservative Style"

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals, was recently published in paperback. He occasionally blogs at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation and is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.

Mickey Ehrlich is a freelance writer based in New York.

Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll: Voters Torn Between Democrats, Republicans in 2010

2009-12-17T01:05:29Z

In December's survey, for the first time, less than half of Americans approved of the job President Barack Obama was doing, marking a steeper first-year fall for this president than his recent predecessors.

Also for the first time this year, the electorate was split when asked which party it wanted to see in charge after the 2010 elections. For months, a clear plurality favored Democratic control.

Bill Keller's Letter 'Casting Aspersions' On Wall Street Journal REVEALED

2009-12-16T10:47:02Z

What letter could this be? We've found it! It was written by Mr. Keller on March 3, 2008, and addressed to the committee that hands out the George Polk Awards in Journalism each year.

The letter asks the committee to "correct a claim in [its] news release about the George Polk Awards."

WSJ. Magazine To Increase Circulation, Frequency

2009-12-16T10:31:03Z

Beginning in March, The Wall Street Journal's quarterly glossy magazine WSJ. will raise its circulation to 1.6 million from 800,000 and increase its publishing schedule to six issues a year. In addition to being available to all subscribers to the Journal in the U.S., WSJ. will be sold on newsstands.

Thomas Frank: Newsrooms Don't Need More Conservatives

2009-12-16T09:11:24Z

Would the solution currently on the table--hiring more Republicans and fewer Democrats--have helped the press behave differently in either situation? It's possible, of course, given the right Republicans.

But it is far more likely that it wouldn't have helped at all

Top Execs' Retirement Plans Had Guaranteed Returns, Despite Losses On Employee Plans: WSJ

2009-12-15T14:38:17Z

One-quarter of top executives at major U.S. companies had gains in their supplemental executive retirement-savings plans in 2008, even as employees had sizable losses in the companies' retirement accounts, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The gains in executive retirement accounts often stemmed from guaranteed fixed returns on executive-savings plans.

Janet Tavakoli: Inside the Wall Street Journal 's Future of Finance Initiative

2009-12-14T19:15:16Z

Last week I was a participant in the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance Initiative in England. WSJ has written a summary of the conference highlights, and missed some key points. Allow me to fill in the blanks.

Paul Volcker, former Fed Chairman and current Chair of the President's Economic Advisory Board, made the most worthwhile comments. Moral hazard was not discussed in the open forums, so Volcker reminded the assembly. Yet even Volcker did not broach the topic of fraud.

Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke on the opening evening. I asked him why massive financial fraud remained unaddressed. Darling appeared momentarily confused and seemed to suggest this was exclusively a U.S. problem to be handled by the courts. I pushed back on this notion. By the time one needs a lawyer, it is too late. I noted that we, the middle aged financiers in the room, are responsible for taking action. If we don't face this issue head on, we will never restore trust in the financial system.

Ana Botin, Banesto's Executive Chairman, suggested that the risk manager should report to the board. Then she blew it with the assertion--made several times--that the CEO can also be Chairman. (Ken Lewis defended his dual role as CEO and Chairman of Bank of America at a Fed conference in 2003. How did that work out?)

I didn't challenge Botin's assertion, because I used my two minutes (literally) during the "Too Big to Fail" breakout session to (unsuccessfully) try to carry the point that when banks fail, we should allow shareholders to be wiped out, and debt holders should take losses. (Under that scenario, most of the current managers would be booted out.) Instead, the group posted the need for a "living will" to be designed by the managers that made life support during our recent crisis a debatable necessity.

Elizabeth Corley, CEO of Allianz Global Investors in Europe, presented conclusions from her panel's discussion of the "Regulatory Frontier." The panel's idea of upgrading regulatory resources was to deploy senior financial institution officers to regulators for two or three years and vice versa. Meanwhile, the financial institutions should chip in to maintain the regulators' former high pay. Howard Davies of the London School of Economics saved me from having to explain the concept of regulatory capture. After he spoke, I was the only one to clap. Apparently everyone else thought the panel was titled the "Predatory Frontier."

Robert Diamond, president of Barlcays PLC, sounded like a financial holocaust denier. He seemed to think that the idea of breaking up banks has only to do with the threat to the financial system, if they fail. The point is that some of these institutions threatened the financial system--and continue to threaten the financial system--because they are too big to manage.

Diamond seemed to dislike the term "socially useless" to describe recent financial innovation and defended Barclays' proprietary trading. Since Barclays has dropped its suit involving its total return swap with Bear Stearns' imploded hedge funds, Diamond may have already forgotten this relevant example of financial innovation gone wrong. Hedge fund investors were wiped out, the hedge funds' dodgy assets landed on Bear Stearns's balance sheet, and later on JPMorgan Chase's balance sheet, after it acquired Bear Stearns. Our past crisis taught us that hedge funds are not independent of the banking system. This transaction wasn't merely socially useless, it had negative social utility.

Mario Draghi, Bank of Italy's Governor and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, seemed to think that hedge funds are independent. This is simply incorrect. If the example above didn't persuade him, he might consider the assets that came back onto bank balance sheets and contributed to market instability. For example, in March of 2008 as Bear Stearns bit the dust, the Carlyle Group's CCC fund assets and the assets of Peloton's funds boomeranged back on bank balance sheets at the most inopportune time.

Bob Diamond defended structured credit products saying there is a real purpose for structuring credit for pension funds. He was probably unaware that state pension funds in the United States were damaged by the unintended consequences of a "AAA" rated structured credit product. The pension funds were wise enough to avoid investing in the product, yet as I explained in my February 2007 letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, large fixed income pension funds were unintenionally harmed by the market distortions caused by this financial innovation.

My letter to the SEC cited this financial innovation as an example of why the special NRSRO designation of the rating agencies should be revoked. The product did not deserve its "AAA" rating. It had substantial principal risk and deserved a non-investment grade, or junk rating. Within a year all of these new "AAA" innovations blew up. Moody's estimated that investors in one of them would get back only around ten cents on the dollar.

Not all financial innovation is harmful, but it is undeniable that in recent years it was a runaway train that nearly derailed the global financial system. You wouldn't have realized that, if you listened to most of the participants. They chiefly represented the interests of large financial institutions, and the financial system is still attached to the privileged placenta of central banks doling out taxpayer subsidies. Most of the conference reflected the insulated thinking of this protective womb.

Nik Deogun To Be CNBC's New Managing Editor

2009-12-14T17:29:13Z

CNBC is preparing to name Nikhil Deogun, one of the top editors at The Wall Street Journal, its new managing editor, according to people close to the parties involved.

Wall Street Journal vs. New York Times: Robert Thomson Lashes Out After David Carr Column

2009-12-14T00:25:32Z

The New York Times' David Carr used his weekly media column Monday to analyze the changes at the Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch bought the publication.

Murdoch's Journal, Carr writes, "is no longer anchored by those deep dives into the boardrooms of American business with quaint stippled portraits, opting instead for a much broader template of breaking general interest news articles with a particular interest in politics and big splashy photos."

Carr goes on to identify editor Robert Thomson and deputy managing editor Gerard Baker as Murdoch's henchmen in tilting the paper's coverage "to the right." Carr writes:

According to several former members of the Washington bureau and two current ones, the two men have had a big impact on the paper's Washington coverage, adopting a more conservative tone, and editing and headlining articles to reflect a chronic skepticism of the current administration. And given that the paper's circulation continues to grow, albeit helped along by some discounts, there's nothing to suggest that The Journal's readers don't approve.

Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits -- "health care reform" is a generally forbidden phrase -- and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)

Thomson has lashed out at the Times in a statement, telling the New York Observer:

The news column by a Mr David Carr today is yet more evidence that The New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.

Keller responded, saying:

While David's column clearly got under Mr. Thomson's skin, I don't see anything in this response that casts doubt upon it. The column was scrupulously fair and, if anything, understated, and I have no inclination to help Mr. Thomson change the subject.

Andrew Winston: News Flash From Bjorn Lomborg and the WSJ : We Should Help Poor People

2009-12-08T18:59:49Z

For some reason I can't understand, Mr. Skeptical Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg keeps getting space in places like the Wall Street Journal and Time to peddle his drivel. The Journal has given Lomborg a weekly op-ed for about 6 weeks to talk about how we shouldn't really tackle climate change.

Here's how each of these weekly missives work. Lomborg picks out one person in a country to talk to and asks them how much they care about climate change. Yesterday, he told us that a very poor person living near Mt. Kilimanjaro doesn't care so much about melting glaciers, but cares more about education about HIV. Last week we learned that a very poor person living near Himalayan glaciers that are melting, which will create vast water and food shortages, also cares more about pressing daily issues of local poverty. Earlier, a very poor person living in Africa told Lomborg we should tackle malaria directly rather than take on climate change. Wow, these are real surprises.

Lomborg's sole purpose in life seems to be creating false arguments that nobody is really making and then knocking them down. In the malaria article, he makes it sound like all the government, NGO, and business work to battle climate change is intended solely to stop the spread of malaria (which may become more prevalent as warmer weather makes things more hospitable to mosquitoes at higher latitudes). So, he says, the potential investment of trillions of dollars to create cleaner, more efficient economies is an expensive solution for malaria. Treated bed-nets are much cheaper.

Well, yeah, no kidding, Bjorn.

As if anyone is saying that reducing carbon is just about malaria, or water supplies in Asia, or only any one of the many specific issues Lomborg splits up into little targets and compares to the whole (inflated) price tag. And, by the way, who said that tackling climate change is separate from helping the poorest among us? The issues are all integrally related and the poorest are being hit hardest by climate changes already. Lomborg always seems to be arguing against some phantom Birkenstock-wearing Greenpeace activist chained to the bulldozer of progress...in the 1970s.

The logic and arguments for decoupling our economies from carbon have evolved tremendously and include national competitiveness and job creation, healthier air, eliminating reliance on fuels from parts of the world that fund terror, and reducing dependence on volatilely-priced, and declining, resources that will raise the cost of doing business over time. This is why many important capitalists such as Jeff Immelt at GE (but not the US Chamber of Commerce of course) are making the business case for climate action.

You'll notice that none of these other reasons actually depend on believing fully in the science. And they make for more prosperous economies, which can help the poor the most. And guess what, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time -- we have to think holistically and tackle issues in a synchronized way.

But overall, what I really love is Bjorn Lomborg taking his argument for helping the poor to the skeptics of the world and going through the Wall Street Journal -- as if this is the crowd lining up to send development money to countries for food, water, and bed nets. Who is he speaking to?

Perhaps the real question here is this: What the heck is wrong with the Wall Street Journal? Today, they pick up Lomborg's arguments hook-line-and-sinker and offer an assemblage of greatest hits on not taking action. But yesterday was really hilarious.

They printed one op-ed -- in a series of daily, relentless lamenting about climate science -- laying out how climate skeptic bloggers (who almost all have no climatology or geology or any -ology background) have dismantled the idea that the actual measured data show an increase in GHG gases (the famous "hockey stick" chart) or any warming at all. Yet, in the same issue of the paper, the WSJ printed a truly helpful, excellent article looking at the main arguments/myths from the skeptics and comparing them to what the scientific community is really saying. The very first comparison is this one...

WHAT THE SKEPTICS SAY: The Earth isn't warming -- at least not to any extent that could actually be called a "crisis." And some data even suggest that the Earth is getting colder. The planet may have grown warmer over the course of the 20th century. But that warming stopped more than 10 years ago, and since 1998 the trend shows less warming or even cooling...

THE RESPONSE: It's true: By most measures, average temperatures this decade seem to have plateaued. But this isn't evidence of a cooling planet. Partly, it's a result of picking an exceptionally hot year -- 1998 -- as a starting point..the long-term trend since the mid-1970s shows warming per decade of about 0.18 degree Celsius (about 0.32 degree Fahrenheit)...The '00s still have been exceptionally warm: The 12 years from 1997 through 2008 were among the 15 warmest on record, and the decade itself was hotter than any previous 10-year period. While 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 -- a result of the cooling counterpart of El Niño -- it was still the 11th-warmest year on record. And 2009 is on track to be among the five warmest.

The Journal is as schizophrenic as the population I suppose, but the op-ed pages are totally out to lunch. We need good reporting now about what we know, and what we don't -- not ideological blustering. And we need to stop creating false tradeoffs between helping the poor and helping the planet, as if the poor -- and all of us -- don't live and breathe on that planet.

Andy Worthington: Former Guantanamo Prosecutor Loses Job for Criticizing Military Commissions

2009-12-08T10:18:02Z

So much for the First Amendment. Morris Davis, the retired Air Force Colonel who served as the Chief Prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, has just lost his job at the Congressional Research Service (a branch of the Library of Congress) for writing, in his personal capacity, an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, in which he drew on his wealth of experience of the Commissions to criticize the Obama administration for its decision to prosecute some Guantánamo prisoners in federal courts, and others in Military Commissions, and a letter to the Washington Post, in which he criticized former Attorney General Michael Mukasey for scaremongering about the administration's decision to try Guantánamo prisoners in federal courts.

In a letter dated November 20, Daniel P. Mulhollan, the director of CRS, told Col. Davis that he had not shown "awareness that your poor judgment could do serious harm to the trust and confidence Congress reposes in CRS," and notified him that he would not be kept on after his one-year probationary period at CRS ends on December 21.

The ACLU immediately stepped in, sending a letter on Friday to Dr. Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress, arguing that "CRS violated the First Amendment when it fired Davis for speaking as a private citizen about matters having nothing to do with his job there, and that CRS must reinstate Davis to his position in order to avoid litigation."

Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, said, "The First Amendment protects Col. Davis's right to speak and write as a private citizen about issues on which he has personal knowledge. Col. Davis didn't give up his right to express his opinions and first-hand knowledge about a matter of such public importance when he left the military commissions system and went to work at CRS."

In correspondence over the weekend, Col. Davis reinforced the ACLU's views, explaining:

I am the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division at the Congressional Research Service (one of five CRS research divisions) at the Library of Congress. My division does not now nor has it ever had responsibility for providing Congress with advice on military commissions; that responsibility resides with the American Law Division ... The Library of Congress has a regulation on outside activities for staff and it "encourages" outside writing and speaking on topics outside the staff member's area of responsibility and the Congressional Research Service has a similar policy ... In short, it was clear that I was prohibited from expressing my opinions publicly on matters within my area of responsibility, but I believe I retained the same right as all citizens to express opinions on matter outside the scope of my official duties.

He added:

The First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech and the Supreme Court has long recognized that public employment does not override that right (although regulation of speech is permissible when related to an employee's official duty ... and as noted, I have absolutely no official duty connected to military commissions). It is ironic that our offices are located in the James Madison Building, which is named for the "Father of the Constitution" and the primary architect of the Bill of Rights who led the effort to secure the right of free speech. I suspect Mr. Madison would be surprised to learn that the right he cherished is denied those working in the building that bears his name.

Morris Davis and the ACLU are right, of course, and I hope that Davis is reinstated. Even aside from the fact that he should be entitled to express his personal opinions under his First Amendment rights, it is difficult to see how his published comments could possibly be construed as demonstrating "poor judgment" that "could do serious harm to the trust and confidence Congress reposes in CRS."

In his Wall Street Journal article on November 10, for example, Col. Davis stated only that the administration's decision to try some prisoners in federal court and others in Military Commissions was "a mistake." As he explained, "It will establish a dangerous legal double standard that gives some detainees superior rights and protections, and relegates others to the inferior rights and protections of military commissions. This will only perpetuate the perception that Guantánamo and justice are mutually exclusive."

And in his letter to the Washington Post, he chided former AG Mukasey for claiming that the decision to try prisoners in federal courts "comes down to a choice between protecting the American people and showcasing American justice," and also for implying that the Commissions were "essential to keep detainees from returning to terrorism." As he added, "The Geneva Conventions permit detaining the enemy during armed conflicts to prevent them from causing future harm. Criminal trials punish past misconduct. Suggesting that the choice is either criminal prosecution or freedom is false."

Ironically (given his subsequent treatment), Col. Davis's comments about the Commissions were actually rather constructive, as he pointed out that the administration "could legitimately choose to prosecute detainees in either forum -- federal courts or military commissions -- and satisfy its legal obligations," noting only that "The problem is trying to have it both ways." He also explained, "It is not as if double-standard justice is required to keep suspected terrorists off our streets. Those detainees who cannot be prosecuted can still be detained under rules the administration approves -- likely in the next several months -- for the indefinite detention of those who pose a threat to us during this ongoing armed conflict."

Jut as ironic is the fact that Davis's dismissal follows nearly a year at CRS in which he has, in fact, been the soul of discretion regarding his former role as the Chief Prosecutor of the Commissions, the politicization that drove him to resign, and the comments he made in February 2008 that led to the immediate resignation of William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's Legal Counsel, even though countless journalists (myself included) would dearly love to talk to him about these matters.

Arguably, no one knew more -- or, at least, felt more keenly -- the politicization of the Commission process in 2007, after the system was revived by Congress in the fall of 2006 (following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2006, which found that it violated both the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice).

Detailed accounts of Davis' resignation -- and his subsequent explanations of his reasons for doing so, which strike at the heart of the Bush administration's torture regime, and its attempts to prosecute the victims of torture over Davis's objections -- can be found, in particular, in my article, "The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials," but to conclude this account with a concise explanation, it is worth noting the following passages taken from that article:

[I]n a blistering op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two months after his resignation, Col. Davis stated, "I was the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, until Oct. 4, the day I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system. I resigned on that day because I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively or responsibly."

[Col. Davis] explained that the particular trigger for his decision was [a] memo ... informing him that he had been placed in a chain of command under Haynes. Stating that he resigned "a few hours after" being informed of this, he mentioned that "Haynes was a controversial nominee for a lifetime appointment to the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, but his nomination died in January 2007, in part because of his role in authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques some call torture." He added, "I had instructed the prosecutors in September 2005 [shortly after taking the job] that we would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the administration has sanctioned."

In February 2008, Col. Davis told Ross Tuttle of the Nation about a conversation he had with Haynes in August 2005:

"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

This, I'm sure you'll agree, is far more explosive than Col. Davis's op-ed and letter regarding the Military Commissions, but even had he chosen to talk about these matters, he should have been free to do so. The fact that he has not is a loss for those of us who wish to see the Bush administration held accountable for its crimes (and who are keen to follow the chain of command from Haynes, via Susan Crawford, the Commissions' Convening Authority, to Dick Cheney and David Addington), but it also provides another demonstration that, when it came to exercising his freedom of speech whilst employed by the CRS, Col. Davis had no intention of demonstrating "poor judgment" at all.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.

Pay Czar Caves On AIG Pay, Lifts $500,000 Salary Limit

2009-12-08T10:14:46Z

Just one day after five execs reportedly threatened to jump ship over government-mandated pay cuts, Obama's "Pay Czar" Kenneth Feinberg is lifting a ban on salaries of over $500,000 per year at the bailed-out insurer AIG.

To put it bluntly, the threats worked.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a group of AIG executives vowed to resign if their pay was cut substantially by Feinberg. (Two of them later retracted the vows.) Today, Bloomberg points to what seems to be an enormous concession by Feinberg. Despite missed dividend payments to the government and nearly $200 billion in taxpayer support, some AIG employees will now be allowed to earn salaries of more than $500,000:

"It's the equivalent of saying, 'We're going home and we're taking our toys with us," Frank Glassner, CEO of Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC, said yesterday in an interview. By paying more in salary, AIG is "increasing what may be considered guaranteed pay by bulking up salary."

Feinberg, the Obama administration's special master for executive compensation, said in October that base salaries at AIG wouldn't exceed $500,000 a year except in cases where there was "good cause" to pay more. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials have urged him to strike a balance between curbing excessive pay and retaining key employees. AIG was rescued with a bailout valued at $182.3 billion.

AIG executives, including traders who claim they weren't responsible for the insurer's near-collapse, argue that Feinberg's pay restrictions will cause an exodus of talent -- 50 execs have reportedly already left the firm.

In addition, AIG may not even be living up to its promise to cut back on the controversial $168 million "retention payments" the company made to employees in March. To date, the government has only received $19 million of the $45 million in retention payments AIG had pledged to repay, the WSJ reported in October. In fact, it's unclear whether those payments will ever be made in full:

"Company officials told investigators that receiving the additional $26 million could hinge on how Feinberg and AIG negotiate the second set of repayments.

AIG said in a statement Tuesday that it continues to work with Feinberg, and that employees in the financial products division have until the end of the year to fulfill their commitments to return a portion of the March payments."

UPDATE: A spokesperson for AIG told the Huffington Post that they had "no update" on the retention payments it pledged to return to the government.

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Amy Bhatt: Outsourcing Responsibility? The Mona Sarika Scandal and Journalistic Ethics

2009-12-07T15:16:55Z

On December 3, we found out that we'd been published in the Wall Street Journal. Well, sort of. Many of our words made it into an online column about "The New Global Indian" -- but our names were nowhere to be found.

In case you haven't heard the details, the Wall Street Journal took down a column written by Mona Sarika and ran a retraction after discovering that she had plagiarized extensively, faked sources, and distorted quotes. Oops.

Following in the footsteps of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, Sarika is the most recent fallen journalist to rise to blogospheric fame. The Huffington Post quickly reported on the story and soon realized that they, and Foreign Policy, had been duped by her too.

After that, publications started dropping Sarika's stories like a bad habit. While this is the appropriate response, there are still lingering issues about ethics, accuracy, and the role of journalism in the digital age.

The first issue is one of protecting writers' credibility -- not just the publications'. Sarika's plagiarized column, published on November 10, ran for over 3 weeks and circulated widely on the Web. Some of our sources saw it, others didn't. But none of them knew that we had not given the green light to use their names or stories in the piece. We hadn't even been asked. (Sources, let this be a lesson -- always contact the journalist who interviewed you if you see something fishy like this!)

Once the story about Sarika's plagiarism broke, we were able to explain to our sources why so much of the personal information they shared with us was now being misrepresented in a high-profile publication. Sarika not only drew exact phrases from our article, but also misattributed experiences and quotes to individuals whose names she only slightly changed. (Really, Sweta Mehta?) It turns out that roughly 40 % of Sarika's column was taken from our June 2009 article for Little India.

As an academic and journalist by trade, we were naturally taken aback by the brazen use of our research and writing, and at a loss as to how to react. I (Amy), a PhD candidate, had conducted the interviews as part of dissertation-level research on H-1b visa workers -- a sensitive topic in today's economic climate -- which required months of relationship-building in the U.S. and India.

As a freelance writer, my (Shiwani's) career is entirely about earning trust from editors, sources, and publications. This is increasingly difficult in an era when freelance writers seem to be a dime a dozen. What's scary is that had the plagiarism not been discovered, my credibility could have been ruined with my sources.

A second issue is that the Wall Street Journal's decision to run their retraction without links to the original pieces from which Sarika plagiarized means that she has gotten way more attention than any of the topics she wrote about. These are important issues that are worthy of public discussion -- and that's the rub.

Removing her piece without directing readers to the original articles fails to convey the significant coverage that is clearly in circulation on the issue of H-1B workers and the economic downturn in the U.S. This isn't just a question of giving credit where credit's due -- it's also about rectifying the misinformation that Sarika perpetuated.

Third, even though the Wall Street Journal removed Sarkia's plagiarized column, you can still easily find the text of it on the Web and in the blogosphere. So the story continues to be read, uncredited and filled with inaccuracies, on the Internet. This may not be an individual publisher's responsibility, but it's a changing reality that all publications need to confront.

So what are writers and media outlets supposed to do? In academia, professors are expected to ensure that their students' work is original. Shouldn't there be the same sense of responsibility amongst journalism professionals?

In fact, there are plenty of free and for-purchase plagiarism detection tools online. When we first got wind of Sarika's plagiarism, we did our own analysis by plugging the text of her article into a free online tool that searches for similar word combinations in other articles on the Web. Had the publisher run Sarika's piece through a similar process, they would've found that her article took full sentences and paragraphs, virtually word for word, from our story and others in the Washington Post and San Francisco Magazine.

Is it foolproof? No, but it raises clear red flags that call for further investigation. In an era when media outlets are under tremendous stress to produce news on tightening budgets, editors need to rely on their reporters to be honest and meticulous. But the news media is also at a critical juncture at which they can't afford to lose the public's trust if they hope to stay afloat.

In a recent lecture to a journalism class at the University of Albany, the notorious Jayson Blair talked about how plagiarism is easier than ever (he should know), thanks to the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle and decreasing staff. Of course, the fact that Blair still has a career at all in journalism speaks to a larger problem where quick output is valued over good reporting in order to feed the news machine.

If nothing else, Sarika's fall from grace has shown that no matter what shortcuts you take -- either as an editor relying on unchecked freelancers or as a writer copying from publicly available work -- the jury is still out on the question of whose responsibility it is to ensure ethics and accuracy in journalism.

Wall Street Journal Plagiarism: Article With Quotes By Fake People Removed From Website

2009-12-03T17:32:47Z

The Wall Street Journal has scrubbed an article from its website after learning that it was plagiarized from several sources.

"A Nov. 10 "New Global Indian" online column by New York City freelance writer Mona Sarika has been found to contain information that was plagiarized from several publications, including the Washington Post, Little India, India Today and San Francisco magazine," a notice to readers now reads where the column once lived.

"In the column, 'Homeward Bound,' about H-1B visa holders returning to India, Ms. Sarika also re-used direct quotes from other publications, without attribution, and changed the original speakers' names to individuals who appear to be fabricated," the notice continued. "The column is the only work by Ms. Sarika to be published by the Journal, and it has been removed from the Journal's Web sites."

The original article — near 1,200 words — described Sarika as "a graduate student and freelance writer who hails from India and currently lives in New York City."

See the article, via Google's cached version:

Editors' Note: Mona Sarika has also written for the Huffington Post. Upon reviewing her work for this site, we have found similar instances of plagiarism and misattribution. Her work will no longer be featured on the Huffington Post.

Thomas Frank: Conservatives Want Republican Purge Trials

2009-12-02T18:18:15Z

Across the land, grindstones sing as axes are sharpened for the RINOs. For years, conservatives have railed against these moderate "Republicans in Name Only," launching primary campaigns against them, pouring money into their opponents' campaign funds, and excluding them from committee chairmanships. But since 2006 the party's pulse has weakened, and the GOP's leaders have decided that nothing is more healthful in such a situation than hacking off a limb or two.

That, evidently, is the thinking behind the 10-point test for GOP candidates that was proposed last week by a group of Republican national committee members. If a candidate "disagrees" with three or more of the points--said disagreement to be determined by one's "voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire"--then they can forget about financial support from Republican central.

Leading conservatives are hopeful about the prospects of the coming period of inquisition and excommunication. As former House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained to the New York Times, "The Republican Party knows it has to repair its standing with the American people."

Others think the measure doesn't go far enough. An unsigned blog post on ConservativeHQ.com, which is maintained by legendary fund-raiser Richard Viguerie, cautions, "A checklist may help to avoid problem candidates, but it's not foolproof. The only way to fully appease conservative grassroots is to back candidates who are reliable, principled conservatives."

As for me, I wonder why the American right is so partial to behavior that, in other lands and other times, we associate with Robespierre types on a mad quest for political purity.

Certain prominent conservatives have lately developed a distinct paranoid streak, accusing liberals of secret socialism and secret czarism as well as mind-bending plans to indoctrinate school children, build a private army, and so on.

For these Montagnards of the right, the enemy is always within, and none dare call it treason--except the brave entertainers of cable and AM radio.

But liberals are not the only impostors abroad in the land. Just as the free-market superstition holds every unpleasant outcome to be traceable to some bit of government economic meddling, so every Republican defeat must automatically be defined as a failure to be conservative enough. Every discredited Republican politician becomes either a traitor or a faker, a secret liberal who somehow pulled the wool over the eyes of the gullible conservative millions.

Defeat and economic disaster have only strengthened this impulse for blame evasion. Conservative economic doctrine, put into effect by conservatives in Congress and the White House, is largely and obviously responsible for last year's financial crisis. Indeed, in my lifetime there has never been a more direct causal connection between ideology and catastrophe.

Ergo, the blame must be located elsewhere, with a hysteria whose claims equal or exceed the urgency of the financial disaster. That's why an America where conservatives are not in charge is an America where virtually every important piece of legislation proposed by the majority is a mortal threat to freedom itself.

And that's why the 10-point purity test will soon be rooting out the final remaining Republican moderates. If only these impostors can be exposed, the next period of GOP rule will bring with it no problems with deficits, earmarks, bailouts, or any of the rest of it.

Or maybe the party will simply head down the path to ever-more thorough bouts of inquisition and purging, resolutely depopulating its conservative pantheon. Consider the central article of the first point on the list--a commitment to "lower deficits." That would not only banish former President George W. Bush and many members of the late Republican Congress, since they infamously squandered the surplus and ballooned the deficit, but also former President Ronald Reagan, whom the authors of the 10-point program, in a long preamble to their test questions, hymn as the ne plus ultra of conservatism.

Indeed, the Reagan administration would flunk the test with flying colors. After item one comes item five, which insists that anyone who would call themselves Republican oppose "amnesty for illegal immigrants"; well, it was Reagan who signed into law the 1986 amnesty bill that is so hated by opponents of illegal immigration.

Item No. 7 demands "containment of Iran," a nation to which the Reagan administration sold weapons. Strike three. Take his name off that airport!

Maybe this current crop of Republican incorruptibles will find, as Mr. Viguerie wrote in 1988, that "responsibility for the ultimate failure of the Reagan Revolution lies with Ronald Reagan himself." They will start to suspect that even those who approve of this test don't meet its standards; that pure conservatism means very few conservatives.

Or maybe they will discover something even more frightening: That once they have unmasked the last impostor and expelled the last RINO, they will have no scapegoats left to take the blame for their next round of disasters.

Read other OpinionJournal stories:

Perevez Musharraf: The Afghan-Pakistan Solution
Christina Romer: Putting Americans Back to Work

Platform For Prosperity's Prospects Doubted In Wall Street Journal Article

2009-12-01T13:29:58Z

DENVER -- To retake Colorado, the Republican Party wants voters like Michael Schneider.

A proud member of the diffuse 'tea-party movement' that gained steam during this summer's town-hall meetings on health care, Dr. Schneider is on the hunt for candidates who promise to buck the political establishment, defy the party elite and hew tightly to conservative principles.

MediaNews Says It WIll Follow Rupert Murdoch's Model, Take Content Off Of Google

2009-11-24T12:45:48Z

Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group Inc., publisher of the Denver Post and Boulder Daily Camera, says that he will block some of his content from Google searches when the company starts charging for premium content in 2010.

Singleton told Bloomberg "the things that go behind pay walls, we will not let Google search to, but the things that are outside the pay wall we probably will, because we want the traffic."

Singleton announced earlier this month that he would begin charging for premium content at two of the company's smaller newspapers, "the Enterprise-Record in Chico, Ca., and the York (Pa.) Daily Record." Howard Saltz, MediaNews' VP for content development has said that the paid content model will be expanded to larger papers, including the Post, if it proves successful in the smaller markets.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has recently considered pulling its content from Google and striking a deal with Microsoft's Bing search engine. In a statement to Bloomberg, Josh Cohen, head of Google's news division said that less than 1 percent of news organizations have opted out of Google news service.

WSJ Could Ditch Google For $15 Million From Microsoft, Analysis Shows

2009-11-24T10:33:36Z

If we estimate that the Journal's online ad revenue is $100 million, using the New York Times as a rough benchmark, then the site would only lose $10 - $15 million to de-list from Google.

LA Times Twitter Guidelines Announced

2009-11-23T17:31:42Z

Los Angeles Times staffers have been warned: the Twitterverse isn't safe. Editor Russ Stanton and assistant managing editor Henry Fuhrmann have issued new guidelines governing the use of social media like Twitter and Facebook. They include:

• Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.

• Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

• Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

• Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

The LAT is the latest in a string of publications to have issued guidelines to staff governing the use of social media. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal have also published new rules, which, like the LAT's, were designed to protect the paper's objectivity in the eyes of its readers -- drawing the ire of bloggers and members of staff who saw them as overly restrictive. Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz vowed "to now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes."

Wall Street Journal Supports Break-Up Of Big Banks

2009-11-23T15:48:41Z

Add the Wall Street Journal editorial board -- of all people -- to the growing ranks of those calling for a restoration of barriers between commercial and investment banking.

In an editorial today, the Journal's anti-regulation free marketeers threw their weight -- albeit in a back-handed way -- behind government limits on "risk-taking" by commercial banks.

The editorial was mostly an assault on Democratic proposals described as offering "unlimited taxpayer funds" to bail out "just about anyone... engaging in finance of one kind or another" in a way that "would entrench moral hazard (and cheaper funding costs for the likes of Goldman Sachs) even deeper into the financial system."

But the editorial concluded: "The other way to reduce moral hazard is to limit certain kinds of risk-taking by institutions that hold taxpayer-insured deposits, as suggested by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and Bank of England Chairman Mervyn King."

That was a reference to Volcker and King's idea to restore the separation between Wall Street investment banks and Main Street commercial banks. "This has its own problems. But unlike the emerging plans in Washington, it is credible and would give capitalism a fighting chance to survive regulatory reform."

Volcker, King, former Citigroup CEO John S. Reed, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz are four financial and economic luminaries advocating for at least a partial return to Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that banned commercial banks from underwriting stocks and bonds. It was repealed in 1999 at the urging of, among others, Larry Summers, President Barack Obama's chief economic adviser.

While progressive economists such as James K. Galbraith and Dean Baker support a return to at least some tenets of Glass-Steagall -- on the premise that banks with taxpayer-guaranteed deposits shouldn't be engaged in risky trading -- the Obama administration does not. The White House wants to regulate the behavior of these banks, rather than break them up.

For the Journal's editorial page to be taking a more pro-regulatory position on any issue than the Obama White House says a lot about our times.

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Microsoft, News Corp Have Talked About De-Indexing From Google

2009-11-22T19:36:55Z

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company's being paid to "de-index" its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

Eric Tipler: The Wall Street Journal on Education: Lies, Myths, and Yellow Journalism

2009-11-20T10:45:09Z

Earlier this month the Ford Foundation made an exciting announcement: they're giving away $100 million to improve secondary education in urban schools.

This is fantastic news to anyone who cares about education, the American Dream, and the future of America's economy. Which is why I was so shocked by an editorial in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. In the misleading, erroneous, and inaccurate "The Edsel of Education Reform," the Journal's editors lambaste the Ford Foundation for giving money away to a "failed liberal establishment" institution: teachers' unions. Specifically, the Journal 1) strongly implies that Ford is giving $100 million to teachers' unions and 2) accuses Ford of ignoring the best paths to reform.

In fact, both claims are false. So why are the editors of our nation's most prestigious financial journal misleading their readers?

First, let's look at what's really going on. Ford's press release (cited by the Journal) clearly explains that the $100 million is going to multiple grantees, including six "Early Grant" recipients, one of which is an innovation fund at a teacher's union. None of the other grant recipients are mentioned in the editorial; instead, the Journal implies that unions are getting all the money (read it yourself and you'll see exactly what I mean).

As if this wasn't bad enough, the rest of the piece is filled with misinformation. The Journal criticizes Ford for not supporting Teach for America or KIPP, but leaves out the fact that some of its grantees apply TFA and KIPP strategies like better teacher recruitment and training and longer school days to schools that KIPP and TFA don't yet reach. It compares Ford unfavorably to the Gates Foundation, but ignores the fact that Gates supports many of the same initiatives as Ford--including, oddly enough, the very teacher's union fund the Journal criticizes! Even more bizarre, the editors take Ford to task for not supporting some specific initiatives--more accountability, charter schools--that its grantees actually support. At the very least, some fact-checking is in order here.

Because this editorial is based on deception (or, more charitably, bad journalism), it's not surprising that harmful myths about education reform are also woven in. The myth that spending more money on poor and minority kids is a waste ("some of the worst school districts in the country spend the most money on students"), the myth that vouchers help kids from low-income communities (they haven't worked, which is why they're off the table), the myth that strict accountability will close the achievement gap (it won't, although accountability with clear standards, and with more capacity to meet those standards will), and the myth that teachers' unions are the enemy (they have problems, but reformers need to work with, not against them).

After all, even if Ford was giving away $100 million to a union innovation fund, would that be the end of the world? Especially when the fund in question supports innovations like charters. It's certainly not how I would spend $100 million, but the Ford Foundation is a charitable institution, not a government agency. In this country, they can do with their money what they please.

I'm usually a fan of the Journal. When they're good, they're good, cf. a recent piece on health care reform by the dean of Harvard Medical School. But this editorial misleads its readers on points of fact, and trades in bigoted and inaccurate myths that hamper reform efforts.

Shame on you, editors of the Wall Street Journal. Shame on you for taking cheap shots at teachers' unions and charitable foundations supporting much-needed reform. What is the nation's financial paper of record scared of? Do they hate the Ford Foundation's "liberal" priorities (which have included, among other things, ending apartheid in South Africa) so much that they're willing to mislead their readers and misrepresent facts to oppose them? Hasn't this decade seen enough dissembling on issues of national substance? Shouldn't kids come before agendas?