Our children are our future, so why do we treat them so poorly?

As public schools in the US are facing one crisis after another (primarily due to the defunding by the advocates of privatization), young people in our country are beset by another attack - increasing criminalization. While progressives have drawn some attention the mass incarceration of Black males, “the evidence suggests that the growing criminalization of American youth is increasingly affecting all races and genders.”

A recent study, published by the Rand Corporation found that Americans between ages 26 and 35 were 3.6 times more likely to have been arrested by the time they turned 26, as compared to those who were born 40 years earlier. Among men aged 26 to 35 with less than a high school education, 60 percent reported having been arrested at least once by age 26.

The findings, published by the journal Crime & Delinquency, are based on the nation's longest-running household survey that has followed families over generations to gather information about their work histories and earnings. “Increased enforcement is likely a critical driver of this trend,” said James P. Smith, author of the study.

Yah think? I don’t remember having police in schools when I was growing up. Law and order has replaced care and comfort when dealing with young Americans. If you got into a fight on school grounds, and I admit I did on a couple of occasions, your parents were called in, not the police.

“As more Americans are arrested and convicted during their younger years, we see an association with a variety of negative trends later in life, including lower chances of being married and less economic success,” Smith added.

Why is our society robbing the next generations of their future? The abject failure to deal with the existential global warming; the ramping up of militarism, which is bringing the world closer to nuclear annihilation; the failure to pass meaningful restrictions on the possession and sale of guns (guns became the leading cause of death for children, ages 1-19, in the US in 2020); the defunding of education and the criminalization of youth – these are all indicators of a society that has lost its way, or should I say, lost its mind.

While we are distracted by the machinations of a mega billionaire with a god complex (yes, I mean you, Elon), a deranged failed businessman and would be dictator (yes, I mean you, Donald), and the rapid rise and fall of the latest Ponzi schemer (yes, I mean you, Sam), our children’s future is slipping away.

I used to say that I would like to leave this world a little better than I found it, but now, I think I’d settle for not leaving it worse. A luta continua, vitória e certa?

 

How the pandemic sets back children’s learning - "The Other Form of Long COVID"

 

Reprinted from the American Prospect (with my comments below)

Kuttner on TAP: The Other Form of Long COVID

Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things. I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement. Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves. A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty. During the pandemic, young children stayed home with parents or grandparents or paid babysitters. They arrive at preschool with no experience of social interaction with other kids, either for play or for learning. A member of my extended family, who is a gifted Montessori teacher, told me, "Some children have never been in a classroom or even group play. Often the child will push, shove, or tug another child to initiate play. This behavior does not entice another child to play." Masks, still worn in lots of preschools, have set back both children’s acquisition of speech and the reading of social cues from other children and teachers. Some kids exposed to peers for the first time cry inconsolably when they don’t get their way. This teacher came up with the device of a "crying chair," both to reduce disruption and to break the pattern. "OK, if you want to keep crying, we have a crying chair," the teacher would say kindly. "You can sit in it as long as you like." Eventually, the child does get tired of crying, but still lacks emotional knowledge of how to re-engage with the group, for either play or learning. A factor that has exacerbated all of these problems is the ubiquity of commercially motivated screen time directed at very small children. Harassed parents relied on this during the pandemic even more than before. As Susan Linn, psychologist and founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, writes in her superb recent book, Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, commercially designed and motivated screen time increases social isolation and undermines a child’s innate capacity for play based on the child’s own imagination. Kids who cultivate this capacity are better able to relate to other children and adults, and to learn. As we dig out from the effects of the pandemic, we will need to invest more in preschools, restore the capacity of schools to make classrooms welcoming places for teachers as well as students, and regulate Big Tech to cease treating kids as profit centers and invading their imaginations. That’s no small set of challenges.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER Robert Kuttner's observations of the effects of COVID on the education of our children only touches on one aspect of the crisis we are facing. The loss of learning time over the past 2 and a half years, the lack of socialization of younger children and the effects of commercial screen time would, by themselves, have presented us with possibly the worst crisis in public education in our history. But this comes at a time when that system faces two other crises; the long-term defunding of the public education and the attacks from the right on our educators and their supporters. One indicator of the defunding of education can be seen in what has been dubbed the "teacher pay penalty".   Simply put, teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time. Prior to the pandemic, the long-trending erosion in the relative wages and total compensation of teachers was already a serious concern. The financial penalty that teachers face discourages college students from entering the teaching profession and makes it difficult for school districts to keep current teachers in the classroom. The relative teacher wage penalty grew to a record high in 2021. It was 23.5% in 2021, up from 6.1% in 1996. In 28 states (including North Carolina), teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar earned by similar college-educated workers in those states. Providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is not simply a matter of fairness but is necessary to improve educational outcomes and foster future economic stability of workers, their families, and communities across the U.S.  Economic Policy Institute, 8/16/22  In January I had posted a blog article that outlined the nature of the crisis in public education in detail - even prior to COVID. The one thing, the ONLY thing, that has stood in the way of the total collapse of the system is our dedicated educators. Again and again they have been asked to do MORE with LESS. But there is a limit to what these heroes can do and a limit to what pressures they can endure, and for many that limit has already been exceeded. Putting public education back together will be a huge job, and must begin today with support for our educators and for providing them the resources they need. We could start by diverting money from our bloated military budget to education. Would a 5% reduction in spending for war, roughly $40 billion, provide the resources needed? Is it time to renew our commitment to the next generation by providing a constitutional right of each and every child to receive a sound basic education (as provided for in the North Carolina Constitution and just reaffirmed on 11/4/22 by the North Carolina Supreme Court). While we are at it, we need to define some other basic rights for all. But more on that later.

Inflation and the Cost of Living – They are NOT the same thing!

You hear a lot about inflation these days. The Republicans have been harping on what they see as the failure of the Biden administration to bring down inflation. The Democratic Party has finally decided it needs to include the problem of inflation in its campaign (better late than never?). And the Federal Reserve has adopted a robust attack on inflation by raising interest rates, which will allegedly bring down inflation by reducing consumer demand for things like housing and new cars and thus cooling off the economy.

But is it inflation that actually hurts ordinary working Americans and, just as importantly, are the proposed “solutions” going to be painless for them? I would argue that the answer to both questions is NO! That’s because two very different processes are being conflated: Inflation and a rise in the cost of living.

Let’s start with inflation. In essence inflation is simply a decline in the value of money; that is a decline in what the dollar you have in your wallet can buy. What is important to note here is that if you don’t have a dollar in your wallet, inflation doesn’t really hurt you. In fact, if you don’t have that dollar, but you owe someone else a dollar, inflation is beneficial to you. The inflated dollar you will end up using to pay your debt will be worth less than what it was when you incurred the debt.

This is how inflation benefits debtors and hurts creditors. People, like bankers and the very wealthy, who have lots of money and/or are owed money, will lose value as a result of inflation. This is why bankers in particular hate inflation and why the Federal Reserve (the bankers’ bank) sees fighting inflation as its number one task. They want to protect the value of their money and make sure that, if you borrowed money from them, the value of the money which you use to pay them back is not less than what it was when they lent you the money. Or, if it is less, that the interest you paid on the loan will make up the difference and then some.

On the other hand, most working-class Americans are debtors. They owe money (on credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, etc.) and probably have very little cash in the bank or under the bed. Their money won’t lose value as a result of inflation since they don’t have any, but their debts will be reduced. Take someone with a $200,000 mortgage. If there is a 10% annual rate of inflation, the value of the money needed to pay down that mortgage after one year will have decreased by $20,000. In that case, what’s not to like about inflation!

There is another important positive effect of inflation for taxpaying Americans. It automatically reduces the value of the debt that the national, state, and local governments (and therefore the taxpayers) owe to those who hold government bonds. Ten percent inflation will reduce the value of the national debt by about $3 trillion, which is three times the current annual budget deficit of the federal government. It would pay down the national debt without raising taxes or cutting services. Hooray!!!

Now what about the cost of living. Inflation does not necessarily drive up the cost of living. That’s because the cost-of-living equation has two sides, so to speak - the prices you pay and the income you receive. If the prices you pay are going up, but your income is going up by the same or a greater percentage, then your cost of living hasn’t really changed. Take someone whose income today is derived from Social Security. In 2022 the prices she pays may have gone up 8%, but, staring in January 2023, her Social Security checks will also increase by 8%. She is no worse off than before and may be better off if she is still trying to pay off her children’s college loans with the newly inflated money from Social Security.

In the 1950s and 60s, a strong labor movement negotiated cost of living allowances in their contracts to offset the moderate levels inflation during that period. The labor movement and their friends in Congress were able to get increases in the minimum wage to offset inflation. The net result was that the cost of living did not increase; in fact, most working Americans saw a very significant improvement in their lives as growing productivity resulted in a period of prosperity. Inflation was not hurting them, particularly if they were buying a home, as millions of Americans did for the first time.

What followed in the 1970s was a period of hyperinflation, the causes of which are a bit more than I want to tackle here. It’s probably enough to note that the costs of the Vietnam War and the spike in oil prices had a temporary effect of boosting inflation rates, much like what is happening today. This took place at the end of the post-WWII boom and was accompanied by declining rates of profit for big business in the US. It led directly to the Reagan Revolution of 1980. Inflation, the wealthy owners of big business and the banks argued, must be controlled, even at the cost of a severe recession. And they got what they wanted.

The result of the Reagan Revolution was, that for the last 40 years the US has had a historically low rate of monetary inflation. It has also seen galloping runaway inequality and the increasing financialization of the economy. These two trends are undoubtedly related to (caused by?) the long period of very low inflation, which favored the wealthy and creditors, i.e., big business and the financial system.

So, what are the political implications of this understanding. Progressives must insist that the response to the current period of inflation and the effect it is having on the cost of living of working Americans, must NOT be another Reagan recession caused by jacking up interest rates (the Fed just approved a fourth increase of 0.75% while I was writing this), but rather one that deals with the other aspect of the cost of living, working class income. A few suggestions for immediate action:

·         Raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour and index it to inflation

·         Reinstate the child tax credit

·         Protect and expand the right to organize unions

·         Expand Medicaid, create a public option for medical insurance and move towards a single payer system (Improved Medicare for All)

·         Significantly raise the minimum Social Security payments

·         Create a federal housing program to subsidize low- and moderate-income housing

·         Subsidize public transportation systems

·         Provide low cost (free?) high-speed internet access to all areas of the country

In other words, reduce the cost of living by providing low cost (or even free) services and enhancing income, while allowing moderate inflation, which benefits the vast majority of Americans, to continue. Radical? Yes, but no more radical than pushing the cost of bringing down inflation on to the backs of working people. What we don't need is another 40 years like the last 40.

EXACTLY 60 years ago

 "[N]uclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world."

—President John F. Kennedy

The more it becomes unacceptable to say words like "diplomacy," "negotiation," "cease-fire," or "peace," the more we need to say them. The more it becomes forbidden to mention the well-deserved blame on both nuclear superpowers, the more we must mention it. When a U.S. president publicly worries about nuclear war on the same day that his party cracks down on progressive Congress Members who merely raised the issue of negotiating peace, failure to point out the absurdity is complicity in a death-wish for the world.

---RootsAction News

Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the joint chiefs of staff under both George W. Bush and Obama, in a recent appearance on the ABC show “This Week” ... sounded exactly like the Progressive Caucus. Putin, he said, is like “a cornered animal.” The possibility that Russia might use battlefield nuclear weapons, he explained "speaks to the need ... to get to the table". 

And, I might add, NOW!

I can remember, quite vividly the days in October and November, 1962 when the possibility of a nuclear holocaust was very, very real. I was a sophomore in college in Bethlehem, PA at a school that sat on a hill above a major steel mill complex. We were quite certain that Bethlehem would be high on the list of targets and were planning our route to a rural area in northcentral PA so we would be able to survive the exchange of nuclear weapons about to ensue. No one thought about what the world would be like after a nuclear war, only how to survive the initial Armageddon. We were very naive.

A lot of things have changed in the last 60 years, not the least of which is the fact that we face other existential threats to our survival - climate change, pandemics and so on. And we have lived under that nuclear cloud for a long time, making it seem all too normal. Perhaps that's why there hasn't been a massive peace movement in this country and Europe in response to the war in Ukraine and the threats of escalation.

Or perhaps there is another even more significant reason - the consolidation of control of the media by corporate and right wing forces - which has made dissent over foreign policy even more un-American than in the past. I am amazed when talking with intelligent friends, many who consider themselves progressive, at how thoroughly the propaganda has blinded them to the underlying causes of the war, which the US has significantly contributed to, and to the necessity of working to de-escalate the situation and, in particular, provide some sort of off-ramp for the Russians and end the very real threat of escalation to a "limited" nuclear war. Don't worry about "Duck and Cover" this time, it's more like "Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye".

Just as troubling is the total failure to understand the linkage between US policy in eastern Europe and what is happening half a world away with regard to Taiwan. While the media and, as a result the public, is glued to the reports from the war in Ukraine, the US is doing everything it can to provoke a war with China: Pelosi's "state" visit to Taiwan, massive "NATO" maneuvers in the South Pacific (aside: why is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization holding maneuvers in the South Pacific?) and a clear announcement that the US will no longer adhere to its "one China" policy and thus oppose militarily any attempt of the People's Republic to assert that Taiwan is part of China. The Chinese haven't fired a shot! Why is the US making moves to provoke them? And, is there a connection with the massive US military aid to the Ukraine? To sum up, what's behind rising US militarism and provocations around the world?

Many in the US peace movement (there is one even though you won't see it in the main stream media) have directed their attention at the military/industrial complex. The Masters of War certainly deserve deserve some of the credit/blame. Approximately 50% of the US military budget goes DIRECTLY to huge corporations! Their CEOs and stockholders are salivating over the prospects of bipartisan support to increase the already bloated war budget.

But I would argue that the unity of prowar forces indicates there is something more sinister underneath this. Is US economic hegemony, which has been a feature of the post Cold War era, increasingly threatened by the BRICS states (led by China) and their growing relationship with other Global South nations? Is the US economic decline threatening its power to dictate the terms of international commerce so that the US feels it necessary to threaten to bring the country and the world to the edge of a nuclear Armageddon to reassert that power?

All of this should put the war in Ukraine and the provocations which led to it in a new light. We should all be worried that the Empire of Liberty, facing challenges around the world (more on that in a future post), could bring us to the brink of WWIII, which we clearly understood during the Cold War, would be "the war to end all wars". Antiwar forces need to connect the dots and build a movement to prevent that.