An excerpt from Arne Duncan’s comments in an address to the American Enterprise Institute, as recorded by Politics K 12:
Duncan is hoping that school administrators won’t cut areas that directly impact the classroom, such as trimming instructional time, and scrapping art and music classes. And he doesn’t want districts laying off “talented young teachers.”
“Unfortunately this pattern of cutbacks has too often prevailed in the past,” he said.
Instead . . . he urged districts to consider “modest but smartly targeted increases in class size.”
Increasing class sizes? As if that won’t “impact the classroom”!
Can you do as well or better this week? Only if you try!
“It is fair to say that 2010 was the year of older, rich people.” That’s the conclusion of a new research memo from Project Vote, “An Analysis of Who Voted (and Who Didn’t Vote) in the 2010 Election,” by Dr. Lorraine Minnite. It finds that wealthier voters and Americans over the age of 65 surged to the polls in 2010, and increased their support for the Republican party, while young voters and minority voters (who strongly favor Democrats) dropped off at higher rates than in 2006.
Two years ago, African-Americans, lower-income Americans, and young Americans all participated in the 2008 presidential election in decisive numbers, making it the most diverse electorate in history. In 2010, however, these historically underrepresented groups were underrepresented again, as they (in common with most Americans) largely stayed home. Non-voters were the majority in 2010, a fact that “throws cold water on any victor’s claims for a mandate.”
This new memo analyzes exit poll and preliminary voting data to give the first comprehensive picture of the 2010 electorate. While this election largely followed patterns typical of midterms, Dr. Minnite found a few distinct features of the 2010 electorate that help explain the results. Absent a national race to galvanize new and minority voters, fewer voters turnout and the populations that do vote tend to be older. The racial composition of the population that voted in 2010 closely mirrored that of 2006: 80 percent of voters were white, 10 percent were black, eight percent Latino, and two percent Asian.
However, several distinct features of the 2010 voting population stand out, and contributed to the results on November 3:
1. Senior citizens turned out in force, with the number of ballots cast by voters over 65 increasing by 16 percent. While making up only 13 percent of the U.S. resident population, Americans in this age group constituted 21 percent of 2010 voters. This age group also significantly increased their support of Republican candidates, from 49 percent in 2006 to 59 percent in 2010.
2. The number of ballots cast by Americans from households making over $200,000 a year increased by 68 percent compared to 2006.
3. Relative to 2008, minority and youth voters dropped out of the voting population at higher rates than whites, undoing much of the gain in demographic parity achieved in 2008.
4. Women-already one of the most reliable voting groups-increased their share of the electorate, and significantly increased their support of the Republican Party.
5. Bucking the national trends, Latinos increased their share of the voting population in several states, saving at least three Senate seats for the Democrats.
“Perhaps the most significant point about voter turnout in 2010 is how many voters didn’t vote,” wrote Steven Thomma and William Douglas at McClatchy Newspapers on our study. “Some 38 percent of eligible voters didn’t vote in 2008, and this November, another 33 percent didn’t show up, which means that ‘nonvoters were the majority in 2010.'”
As we know from our recent poll (among others), the electorate as a whole is shifting away from the views and values of these older, wealthier white conservatives who dominated the 2010 election: “As in most midterm elections, the people who voted in 2010 were not really representative of the American people,” says Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote. “This study raises serious questions about which constituencies candidates choose to court and engage as they look ahead to 2012, since the electorate, as a whole, is shifting away from the views and values of the older, wealthier white conservatives who dominated the 2010 election.”
Paul Krugman in what may be his finest blog post articulates a fear I have had but been unable to properly express:
But watching the failure of policy over the past three years, I find myself believing, more and more, that this failure has deep roots – that we were in some sense doomed to go through this. Specifically, I now suspect that the kind of moderate economic policy regime Brad and I both support – a regime that by and large lets markets work, but in which the government is ready both to rein in excesses and fight slumps – is inherently unstable. It’s something that can last for a generation or so, but not much longer.
By “unstable” I don’t just mean Minsky-type financial instability, although that’s part of it. Equally crucial are the regime’s intellectual and political instability.
The failure here is not the policies themselves, but the 2nd and 3rd order intellectual and social structures that maintain sufficient social support for the policies of curtailed capitalism and the state enforcement of broad social mobility and equality. In this sense, I say the New Deal did fail, because it failed to sustain itself much past the generation of people who lived through the crisis that made it possible. It is getting harder to protect Social Security because with each passing year there are less people with living memory of what life was like without it. Those people were generally immune to the propaganda, but those of us left behind lack that personal connection to seeing retired people reduced to begging and literally dying in gutters and under bridges.
That’s what we have to account for if and when we create the conditions to implement a New New Deal. How to make the liberal consensus not only strong enough to do it, but self sustaining?
I’m on paternity leave (and struggling through serious sleep deprivation!), but I wanted to pass on word of the Nation magazine’s “30 Media Heroes” contest. You can vote in the contest here by either leaving a comment at the bottom with your votes, sending a Tweet to @GregMitch, or sending an email to [email protected].
Obviously, I hope you’ll consider voting for some OpenLeft writers, but, of course, there are a ton of great progressive media voices out there to choose from. So just make sure to vote, no matter who you vote for.
Here are the leaders in the contest as of this morning, but more votes are still expected to come in. Voting ends tonight – so again, go vote!
In Quick Hits earlier in the week, expanded upon in a Blue Virginia diary, Lowkell called attention to a highly report from the Education Trust, Subprime Opportunity: The Unfullfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities, and asked why Virginia Democrats are considering electing a top lobbyist for these vultures–Brian Moran–as chairman of the state party.
In his diary, Lowkell writes:
What does this new report conclude? A few highlights (actually, lowlights of this dirtbag industry):
*”Today’s low-income and minority students, seeking college degrees in record numbers, are recruited aggressively by for-profit colleges.”
*”For-profit tuition is higher than at public institutions, and once grant aid is taken into account, unmet need is even higher than at private nonprofit colleges and universities.”
*”Students borrow heavily, resulting in heavy debt burden and high loan defaults, which indicates that few end up with a marketable degree or credential.”
As if all that’s not bad enough, this report concludes that the for-profit “education” industry makes “the rich, richer and the poor, poorer,” providing “highcost degree programs that have little chance of leading to high-paying careers,” “[saddling] the most vulnerable students with heavy debt,” and “[paving] a path into the subbasement of the American economy.“
The idea of having a lobbyist for this industry head the Virginia Democratic Party is appalling, and should be opposed by all Democrats. But because this ties into the ongoing assault on public education that Jeff has been chronicling in his excellent Sunday “Left Ed” series AND because it illustrates the workings of the new American conservative welfare state model (see, in particular, my recent diary, “Mass student failure equals billions for executives running for-profit US colleges”) , I want to expand a bit on Lowkell’s highlights of the report, using a series of charts from the report itself and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation (both available at the report link above). After presenting these charts, I’ll say a few words about what they mean in terms of the growth of the new model conservative welfare state and how its growth is related to the intentional destruction of America’s welfare state at its peak.
First, let’s start with the appalling low graduation rates:
As if this weren’t bad enough, the “industry leader,” Phoenix University, which accounts for over 2/3rds of the students attending the top 10 for-profit colleges & universities, has the lowest graduation rate–an even more appalling low 9%:
Change in share of total hours worked by lowest, middle and highest income occupations between 1993 and 2006
This all happened before the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession.
We’re not alone, and we’re not the worst. It’s a pervasive trend among the established Western industrial democracies. But since we have the weakest welfare state to help soften the blow, and the deepest ideological antipathy to doing anything about it…. Well, let’s just say that this chart gives an indication of how badly screwed we are right now, since (a) the global oligarchs are in denial about the ongoing Great Recession & what needs to be done about it, and (b) this chart shows–from yet another perspective–that the problems began long before the Great Recession started.
“I am thankful for the Web. It is an enormous potential equalizer in giving progressives without money comparable input into public debate as the right-wingers with lots of money. In this vein, the Huffington Post’s webhits are going up. The Washington Post’s circulation is going down.” – Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
“I’m thankful that Sarah Palin might actually run for president. It will be a lot of fun to watch and we can feel confident that in the end she will be fully refudiated.” – Eric Alterman, columnist and author most recently of Why We’re Liberals
“That even in a time of broken ideals, our idealism can still keep us pushing forward. I am also thankful that the Fed and the Obama administration have not yet completed their transfer of private wealth to the small handful of too-big-to-exist banks.” – Joshua Rosner, Managing Director, Graham Fisher & Co., Inc.
“For all the disappointment, I am thankful John McCain is not president.” – Jeff Madrick, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and author of The Case for Big Government
“I’m grateful that we won’t have Larry Summers to kick around anymore.” – James K. Galbraith, author of The Predator State and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin
“That there aren’t enough jobs in our government, political parties, and mass media for the turkeys who want them.” – Thomas Ferguson, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, Professor of Political Science at U Mass, Boston, and author of Golden Rule
“That the GOP ran three certifiably insane Tea Party candidates in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware, thereby ensuring that the Democrats at least retained control of the Senate, and thereby arresting the complete descent into the abyss.” – Marshall Auerback, Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
“I am grateful to Social Security, which made it possible for our family to avoid economic disaster when my father died of a second heart attack when he was 41. I am grateful to a nation in which I could be a serial whistle blower, exposing the misconduct of two presidential employees, the Speaker of the House James Wright, and the ‘Keating Five’ – and survive. And I am grateful to the Ancients, who faced a vastly crueler world and recognized that the key was for each of us to try to repair it, and whose advice has led generations to make those repairs, rather than accepting cruelty, greed, exploitation, and indifference as the natural state. I am thankful for all who came before and worked to make things better.” – Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and white-collar criminologist
“That we still have enough of a semblance of rule of law in this country that judges are not giving banks a free pass on the failure to adhere to the terms of their own contracts and the abuse of legal processes.” – Yves Smith, founding editor of Naked Capitalism and author of ECONned
“I’m thankful because every new political dynamic brings its own opportunity for victories. After the Republican victory in 1994, our trouncing them on the government shutdown reminded people of the things they liked about government. After the demoralizing Bush re-election in 2004, when the GOP controlled every branch, our smashing of Social Security privatization sparked a new progressive awakening. We can beat these bastards again if we hang together and don’t wimp out.” – Mike Lux, CEO of Progressive Strategies, L.L.C.
“I am thankful that the Blue Dog caucus was slashed in half. Also thankful for the blogosphere and dedicated progressive bloggers in particular for their unrelenting work.” – Pavlina Tcherneva, assistant professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College
A quick word on the TSA scanner/pat-down outrage, after reading Digby’s piece on “security theater”, and TSA Administrator John Pistol’s op-ed in yesterday’s USA Today.
I attended Yom Kippur services a few months ago at Temple Beth Am synagogue in Williamsville, New York, as I do pretty much every year. Every year patrons are asked to remove objects from their pockets and are patted down. I was, it went smoothly, and I went on my way.
I was in Charlottesville last Saturday for a Dave Matthews Band show, and I was patted down before entering John Paul Jones Arena, like every other patron.
I will be home for Thanksgiving this week and will attend a Buffalo Sabres game on Friday, and will be patted down, like I am at every Sabres home game.
The attendance at these three events, non-overlapping, is just under 35,000 people. Yet those screenings were and always are so pathetically cursory that I often joke with my companions on the way in about the knifes or other weapons I could have easily hidden in my shoe, under my belt, or any number of other places. If they can’t stop a guy like me from bringing a weapon in, they sure can’t stop someone a lot better and more dangerous than me. But hey, we shouldn’t go too far into people’s privacy- just far enough to keep people feeling safe.
And you know what? That’s the real security theater, here- not the airports. It’s the events that have tens of thousands, even a hundred thousand people attending, but don’t involve an airplane, so just-a-little-screening-but-not-too-much will do. Often it’s because of money- I bet some authorities would like to have screening at every DC metro stop, but it’s not doable. And I don’t want my civil liberties violated, but I’d also like to not get hurt attending a concert, or religious service, or sporting event. Yet when TSA decides it will do that job, except doing it in a way that is far more thorough, people feel violated.
I don’t know what the balance is, and I don’t pretend to be a terrorism expert. And the new procedures have certain civil liberty concerns. But I will say that the new TSA procedures aren’t the outrage, to me. It’s in what Digby writes:
It’s not like the they haven’t shown that they are creative enough to do something other than blowing up an airplane to make their point. Look at the London and Madrid subway bombings or the Mumbai operation or that horrible Chechen school hostage taking.
Exactly. Terrorism goes far beyond the airports. The outrage is what is not being done to improve just-a-little-screening-but-not-too-much checks- or none at all.
