NY Times To Lay Off/Eliminate 7.5% Of Newsroom Staff - How Come Opinion Page Columnists Are Immune From Cuts?

From the NY Times:

The New York Times plans to eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs, as well as a smaller number of positions from its editorial and business operations, offering buyouts and resorting to layoffs if enough people do not leave voluntarily, the newspaper announced on Wednesday. 

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the newspaper’s publisher, and Mark Thompson, its chief executive, said that in addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, was shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers.

The reductions, they said, were intended to safeguard the newspaper’s long-term profitability.

“The job losses are necessary to control our costs and to allow us to continue to invest in the digital future of The New York Times, but we know that they will be painful both for the individuals affected and for their colleagues,” the note said.

...

 

The Times has made cuts to its newsroom staff several times over the last six years. The paper eliminated 100 newsroom jobs in 2008, another 100 in 2009, and 30 more senior newsroom jobs at the beginning of last year.

It's interesting to me that every time layoffs are announced, the high paid columnists on the opinion pages are never part of the cuts.

How much are Brooks, Friedman, Dowd, and Kristoff making between them?

I bet you could save a couple of newsroom jobs by sending just one of them packing.

But it's never the high-priced neo-liberal whores on the opinion pages who get shown the door when cuts get announced.

How come that is?

Not saying I want to see the columnists lose their jobs (unlike some of those same columnists, who love the idea of firing teachers), but if it's between newsroom staff who are actually working for a living and these columnists who parrot neo-liberal talking points for a living, I'd rather see the columnists go.

Oh, and just to show you how warm and fuzzy capitalism is, the Times stock was up nearly 10% after the cutbacks were announced:

The announcements were welcomed by investors, with the company’s stock closing at $12.30, up $1.08, or 9.6 percent, after closing Tuesday at a 52-week low.

Lay people off, stock goes up.

The American Dream in a nutshell.

Tom Friedman, Arne Duncan Miss This Part Of The South Korea Story

Tom Friedman wrote another doozy of a column this morning, blaming lazy American children and parents for the so-called education crisis in American schools.

He used an Arne Duncan speech from 2009 to drive his point home - American students and parents are lazy, American schools are bad.

Unlike, say, schools, parents and students in South Korea:

“In 2009, President Obama met with President Lee of South Korea and asked him about his biggest challenge in education. President Lee answered without hesitation: parents in South Korea were ‘too demanding.’ Even his poorest parents demanded a world-class education for their children, and he was having to spend millions of dollars each year to teach English to students in first grade, because his parents won’t let him wait until second grade. ... I [wish] our biggest challenge here in the U.S. was too many parents demanding excellent schools.

“I want to pose one simple question to you: Does a child in South Korea deserve a better education than your child?” Duncan continued. “If your answer is no ... then your work is cut out for you. Because right now, South Korea — and quite a few other countries — are offering students more, and demanding more, than many American districts and schools do. And the results are showing, in our kids’ learning and in their opportunities to succeed, and in staggeringly large achievement gaps in this country. Doing something about our underperformance will mean raising your voice — and encouraging parents who aren’t as engaged as you to speak up. Parents have the power to challenge educational complacency here at home. Parents have the power to ask more of their leaders — and to ask more of their kids.”

Here's that world class South Korean school system in a nutshell:

SEOUL: Nearly 140 South Korean school students killed themselves in 2012, according to a new government report that cited family problems, depression and exam stress as the main triggers.

The report, published this week by the Education Ministry, covered all students from elementary to high school.

The figure of 139 suicides recorded last year was the lowest for three years, but still worryingly high in a country with one of the world’s highest overall suicide rates.

Of the total, 88 were high school students, 48 from middle school and just three from elementary school.

About 40 percent were motivated by family-related problems, while 16 percent were triggered by depression and 11.5 percent by exam-related stress.

Dozens of teenagers kill themselves every year around the time of South Korea’s hyper-competitive college entrance exam, unable to cope with the intense scholastic and parental pressure to secure a place in a top university.

Last year’s student suicide figure compared with 202 suicides in 2009, 146 in 2010 and 150 in 2011.

South Korea has the highest suicide rate among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, with an average of 33.5 people per 100,000 taking their lives in 2010, far higher than Hungary (23.3) and Japan (21.2) which ranked second and third.

The figure for South Korea equates to nearly 50 suicides a day and shows a steep increase from 2000 when the average incidence of suicide was 13.6 people per 100,000.

The capital Seoul has installed anti-suicide monitoring devices on bridges over the Han river after 196 people jumped to their deaths last year.

South Korea - a country that leads in international test score competitions, child and teen suicides and overall rates of people killing themselves.

Hell, so many people were killing themselves, they had to put up anti-suicide monitoring devices on the freaking bridges.

And this is the school system and school culture Duncan and Friedman want to bring here?

Tom Friedman - The Imperial Messenger

Here:

How does a journalist with a track record of bad predictions and a penchant for superficial analysis - a person paid to reflect about the world yet who seems to lack the capacity for critical self-reflection - end up being treated as an oracle?

The answer is simple: Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He's the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down, imperial culture that doesn't want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman's world, we're always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.

As a reporter, columnist, author or speaker, Friedman's secret to success is in avoiding the journalistic ideals of "speaking truth to power" or "afflicting the comfortable." Those ideals are too rarely met in mainstream journalism, but Friedman never goes very far beyond parroting the powerful and comforting the comfortable. Friedman sees the world from the point of view of the privileged, adopting in his own words the view of "a tourist with an attitude" when reporting on the rest of the world.

Actually comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted seems to be the defining characteristic of most American journalists.

Friedman just does it the best.

UPDATE: Here's how wrong Friedman was on the Celtic Tiger:

Writing in the New York Times on 1 July 2005, Tom Friedman argued that the rest of the world should "Follow the Leapin' Leprechaun." He argued one of the best things Ireland had done was to "make it easier to fire people, without having to pay years of severance. Sounds brutal, I know. But the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people." In a wildly inaccurate statement, he wrote that: "And by the way, because of all the tax revenue and employment the global companies are generating in Ireland, Dublin has been able to increase spending on health care, schools and infrastructure." In reality, the government at the time was not only not generating revenue, its investment in education was declining and it was beginning to accumulate massive debt. Today, Ireland's deficit is at 32% of GDP -- the highest in the Eurozone.

Of course, Ireland has not only a deficit crisis, but now a massive banking crisis which was the result of a skewing of the Irish economy in 2001 towards construction and mortgage lending facilitated by large international banking exposure, well underway when Friedman made his assessment. In 2005, Friedman argued that the Irish path was far superior to that of Germany, which was holding onto jobs and major industrial production. Meanwhile, a central assertion of Friedman was that Ireland had gotten its governance right. The then prime minister, Bertie Ahern boasted to Friedman in 2005 of having "met the premier of China five times in the last two years." Jump forward five years, and Bertie Ahern was run out of government in disgrace and the new party that led the polls heading towards a new election for 2011 was, for the first time in history, Labour. In March 2010, Eamon Gilmore, the head of Labour, called out the new leader of the government, Brian Cowen, for having committed "economic treason."

Now, Irish banks are to be bailed out by the EU and the IMF to the tune of 85 billion euro at a 5.83 percent interest rate that the country simply cannot afford to pay back. The government will reap enormous pain on its own population in deep budget cuts that are likely to hinder economic growth for years to come. Ireland is a nation lying in economic catastrophe and about to get much worse.

The legacy of Friedman's failed analysis is regrettably, important still today. Ireland, under strong pressure from the American Chamber of Commerce, is holding onto its low corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent hoping to keep the international businesses there. While Ireland gains from this, the impact of foreign companies is not going to solve the country's problems. In fact, Ireland could raise its corporate rate substantially and still be among the lowest in the European Union. The political calculation is, in effect, should Ireland tax international businesses? Or should it cut health benefits for seniors, punish the poor, and stand by while a new generation of talent emigrates?

Friedman loves to talk about giving companies the freedom to fire people.

Any writer as wrong as he has been on a host of issues - from the Iraq war to the Celtic Tiger - ought to be fired himself.

But that won't happen in these last days of the Roman Empire.

Tom Friedman

Valerie Strauss takes Tom Friedman to task for his recent education reform column:

The great New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in a recent piece that if he were a cub reporter today, he’d want to be “covering the epicenter of national security -- but that would be the Education Department.”

Then he goes on to quote liberally from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, taking no account of what veteran teacher Anthony Cody, in a recent piece on his blog, described as a serious mismatch between the secretary's words and actions.

If Friedman the cub reporter had turned this piece in, a veteran education editor would have sent it back, asking him to back up his contentions with research. He’d have a hard time.

...

Friedman listed the three things young people need to be able to do to thrive in a knowledge economy: "the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate."

These are not the skills that are fostered when standardized tests become education's focus, When the scores are used for high-stakes decisions on students, teachers and schools, what becomes paramount is test preparation, and, as a result, curriculum narrows while kids spend time learning how to fill in bubbles on answer sheets. We saw this happen in the No Child Left Behind era, and while Duncan often says this is no way to run a school system, his policies are doing nothing to change it.

It matters when important columnists ignore research about subjects they are writing because they have followings and their readers expect that they have done their homework. It’s too bad Tom Friedman didn’t study a little harder for this.

Read the whole Strauss post - I agree with all of it except for that part about Friedman being a "great" columnist.

Given the kind of dreck Friedman regularly has churned out on the Iraq war, the Middle East, globalization, and environmentalism, there is nothing "great" about him.

I don't have the time to show all the Friedman dreck from the past in this post, but let me steer you toward something I did on Friedman earlier this month.

Also Matt Taibbi has done a great job of exposing the Muoustach of Understanding for the buffoon he is here.

Friedman is quite literally one of the dumbest and most hypocritical people working in journalism today.

Considering all the people working at the various Murdoch outlets and all the corporate crap reporting that gets done on cable and at the networks, that's saying something.

Yet, as Paul Harvey used to say, "It's true."

Why Aren't Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, And Tom Friedman Trying To Reform This?

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Tom Friedman all called for teachers to make less money, lose job protections, and have their pay tied to performance-based data.

They say this will make teachers more "professional" and bring much-needed business practices to education.

Meanwhile in the real world, here is what business practices have brought us:

MIAMI — All she wanted was $50,000 from the equity in her house to help pay the bills while looking for a job in nursing. What Imogene Hall got was a brutal lesson in the sometimes shady ways of the mortgage industry.

It's a lesson learned by untold numbers of homeowners in Florida, epicenter of the foreclosure crisis gripping the nation.

"Everywhere I turn, someone else is scamming me,'' said Hall, a 49-year-old Jamaican immigrant who stands to lose her Miami Gardens home the Monday after Thanksgiving. "All I do is work hard, and I get surrounded by thieves.''

A review of court records found evidence of misconduct at nearly every stage of Hall's experience. Consider:

_ Johnson Cuffy, a former mortgage broker now serving an 11-year prison sentence for grand theft, handled Hall's refinancing in early 2006, using a strategy a state investigator described as ``outright mortgage fraud.'' He faces up to 30 more years in prison if convicted of 16 other mortgage fraud charges he's facing.

_ The title agent who signed the crucial deed transfers that Hall's fraud claim rests on operated an unlicensed title company that stole more than $1.5 million from South Florida home buyers during closing proceedings between 2005 and 2007, according to Florida Supreme Court records.

_ A man who listed his employer as a nonexistent Blockbuster Video store in New York somehow used Hall's home as collateral to secure a $230,000 loan from subprime lender Argent Mortgage.

_ Hall's foreclosure was processed by the Florida Default Law Group, one of four Florida law firms being investigated by the state attorney general for using flawed documents to repossess homes from thousands of owners.

QUICKIE OUTCOME

After spending more than three years in the judicial system, Hall's case was transferred to Miami-Dade's County Court's new foreclosure-only division in July. There, Judge Jeffrey Rosinek, who was fresh to the case, quickly tossed out Hall's fraud defense, and granted the bank a swift summary judgment in a process critics describe as a "rocket docket.''

Hall's foreclosure defense lawyers, in what has become a booming -- and sometimes predatory -- business, charged her more than $20,000 while regularly failing to show up in court. One lawyer charged Hall $2,800 for work he did trying to withdraw himself from the case.

Law enforcement officers are scheduled to come to Hall's house to evict her and her family next week, nearly five years after a mortgage broker showed up on her doorstep unannounced, pitching a stress-free refinance.

Hall, who lives in the modest home with four children and three grandchildren, says her troubles began in late 2005 when she was struggling to find work as a home health nursing aide. As her bills piled up, she considered tapping into the equity she had built in her three-bedroom home. The market was booming, and homeowners all around her were using equity to take vacations, remodel kitchens and pay down consumer debt.

She says she received an unsolicited visit from Cuffy, manager of BlueKap Financial Group, who promised to handle a refinance and help her get $50,000 equity out of her home.

According to state investigators, Cuffy's strategy was steeped in fraud. In a scheme he allegedly used multiple times in South Florida, he recruited a ``straw buyer'' -- someone with no real intention of occupying the property -- to take deed to Hall's home. He then used an inflated appraisal and the straw buyer's credit information to take out a $230,000 mortgage before transferring the deed back to Hall.

The Miami-Dade County property appraiser had valued the home at just under $132,000 the year before the loan was taken out.

$25,000 FEE

Closing documents from the sale show that Cuffy and his affiliates made more than $25,000 in transaction fees, and pocketed more than $180,000 from subprime lender Argent Mortgage Company, without Hall's knowledge, she says. Hall received the balance of the $230,000 loan -- about $50,000 -- the proceeds of what she thought was a simple refinance.

R. Scott Palmer, the attorney general's Mortgage Fraud Task Force chief, said similar mortgage fraud schemes were prevalent during the boom years as fraudsters looked to take advantage of a rising market and unsuspecting homeowners.

"They preyed on people who had equity in their homes that they could strip, and what you described happened to this person has happened to a lot of people,'' he said.

John Swope, a Department of Financial Services agent who has been investigating Cuffy and his entourage for the last three years, said the mortgage fraud ring made millions of dollars in Florida real estate transactions that closely mirrored Hall's.

"The loan is never anticipated to be paid back,'' he said. "Unfortunately, I've had people who have become homeless because of this individual.''

Others involved in the sale -- closing agent O.J. Odunna, title issuing company Organized Title and BlueKap affiliate Cliff Johnson -- have all been either charged or convicted by law enforcement officials of mortgage-related offenses in other South Florida cases.

Unlike most homeowners fighting foreclosures, Hall claims she had been making her mortgage payments when she received a default notice from the bank. At the urging of Cuffy, she made monthly mortgage payments of $1,500 to Tamarac-based BlueKap Financial, but the money was never used to pay the lender, she said.

Court records show that BlueKap sent her bogus receipts each month indicating ``mortgage paid,'' but a few days after receiving her eighth receipt, she got a letter from Argent Mortgage saying the lender intended to foreclose on her home.

"None of the money I gave [Cuffy] went to pay the mortgage,'' said Hall, whose monthly mortgage bill more than doubled after the refinance. ``Such a wicked man. He did nothing but lie to me.''

Cuffy is currently serving an 11-year stint for grand theft, and faces a host of mortgage fraud charges, along with family members who helped him run the now-defunct BlueKap. Swope said the company targeted homeowners who were in distress.

GUY FROM NEW YORK

His alleged straw buyer, Kervyn Harris, is a prime example of how easy it was to get a home loan during the housing boom as money moved fast and due diligence was often scarce in banks' loan origination departments. Harris, of New York, ran up a quick $1.3 million bank tab in South Florida with five different mortgage loans in an eight-week period between Dec. 8, 2005 and Feb. 1, 2006.

Although his mortgage applications listed a job at a nonexistent Blockbuster Video in New York, he had no trouble getting $230,000 in loans from Argent Mortgage for Hall's Miami Gardens house. All of the homes Harris bought during his spree -- each at inflated prices and with subprime financing -- immediately went into foreclosure, court records show. He is listed as the borrower and main defendant in Hall's foreclosure case, but has never been to any of the court hearings. He could not be reached for comment, and the Department of Financial Services wants to reach him for questioning, Swope said.

In a case where mortgage fraud is alleged and the victims include both the lender and the homesteaded property owner, foreclosure court proceedings between those two parties are especially complex.

Deutsche Bank, a trustee representing Argent Mortgage in Hall's foreclosure, has denied knowledge of any fraud in court, claiming that it is entitled to recoup the lender's losses. A Deutsche spokesman said the bank does not comment on individual cases.

Deutsche Bank is a trustee for several lenders and it became the trustee for Hall's loan after it acquired a pool of loans that included hers, in 2006.

Jonathan Heller, a defense lawyer representing a Miami homeowner who is facing foreclosure and claiming mortgage fraud, said banks are generally determined to foreclose in spite of evidence of fraud, and judges are too overwhelmed with huge case backlogs to consider complicated defenses.

LARGE VOLUME

``These cases are handled in large volume -- and the majority of them are pro forma -- but many of the files are tinged with fraud and irregularities,'' he said. ``The court simply does not have the time to hear the grievances of a homeowner raising fraud issues, which are fairly prevalent.''

Hall's court hearings started in 2006 -- before the tsunami of defaulting loans flooded the court systems -- and lawyers sparred over the legitimacy of the loan for more than three years. In the early stages of Hall's foreclosure proceedings, Judge Ronald Friedman prevented the lender from closing the case on multiple occasions, pointing out irregularities and allowing Hall to mount a legal defense.

But lingering case-files like Hall's have become the bane of the Miami-Dade court system as it has amassed the largest foreclosure backlog in the state and new filings have poured in faster than judges can close out old cases.

In July, armed with $862,053 in state funding, Miami-Dade initiated sweeping changes to the way it handled foreclosures. The funding came with strings attached: the county was expected to clear out 52,000 cases in a year -- about 200 per day -- more than have ever been solved in such a short span of time. Miami-Dade's backlog currently stands at about 70,000 cases. The number is about 39,000 in Broward County and nearly 3,000 in Monroe County.

The reform measures included the creation of Section 50, a floating courtroom designed specifically to take on foreclosure cases that were more than two years old, and make them quickly disappear.

Hall's foreclosure case-file was transferred to Section 50 in July.

A new judge, called back from retirement, made quick work of the proceedings in August, approving the foreclosure in the type of swift hearing that many have criticized as a ``rocket docket'' that favors lenders. Between July and September, some 46,940 foreclosure cases in Florida were decided by summary judgment, according to the Office of State Courts Administration. Only 23 cases in the entire state went to trial.

Hall claims that during her 15-minute hearing, the judge did not allow her or her lawyer to get in a word.

``The first judge was so nice -- helping me, helping me,'' Hall said. ``Then they [transferred] my case, and the second judge wouldn't listen to anything. He just said `You're going to lose the house, you're going to lose the house.' ''

BAD TO WORSE

Hall has had even worse luck with her legal representation along the way. Foreclosure defense is a growing business in Florida, where hundreds of thousands of homeowners are facing the prospect of losing their most valuable asset. Many are turning to lawyers and foreclosure rescue agencies.

Hall paid her first lawyer, Alan Soven, more than $10,000 to fight the foreclosure. At one point Judge Friedman rebuked the Miami lawyer for subpar legal work, and the Florida Bar ordered him to refund $2,000 in legal fees to Hall in a mediation settlement. With a $400 hourly rate, he charged Hall nearly $3,000 for the 7.2 hours he spent trying to get legal approval to quit the case, court records show.

Soven declined to comment on the case.

Hall's next lawyer, Johnny Kincaide of The Kincaide Law Group in Weston, routinely skipped crucial court hearings and failed to file a response to a court ruling, causing the judge to penalize Hall with an order of default. Kincaide's firm is being investigated by Attorney General Bill McCollum after several homeowners said he promised to help them get a mortgage modification and then disappeared after taking their initial deposits. He did not return calls seeking comment.

The unlikely common denominator for all of this is a humble home on a quiet side-street in Miami Gardens, where Hall has lived for 13 years. She paid just over $80,000 for the home in 1997. Despite overwhelming evidence that Hall was likely a victim of mortgage fraud, Deutsche Bank won its foreclosure case, with a final judgment of $303,000 for the home, which the county appraiser valued at $98,310 this year.

Hall, who grows emotional when she talks about what now appears to be an inevitable eviction, says losing her home would be a devastating end to what has been a nightmarish ordeal.

``I can't sleep at night -- I worry, worry, worry about where I'm going to go,'' she said. ``I looked for help but nobody wanted to help me. I don't know what I'm going to do.''

Key quote - "Everywhere I turn, someone else is scamming me."

I know the feeling.

God help this woman and her family.

I'm not a religious sort, but I do hope if there is something akin to John Bunyan's hell, all the people who scammed Hall spend some time in it.

And the same goes for Gates, Duncan, Friedman, and all of the others who have conducted this concerted effort to destroy public education and the teaching profession.

BASH THE TEACHERS: Tom Friedman Edition

Before I get to my review of Tom Friedman's column on teaching from today's Times, I'd like to remind my readers of a few things regarding Mister Friedman.

First, I'd like to remind everybody how wrong Tom Friedman was on the Iraq war:



Then I'd like to remind everybody how Tom Friedman likes to lecture Americans to be environmentally-prudent while he lives here:




Finally I'd like to point out that Friedman likes to write about the financially irresponsible Wall Street bankers and CEO class who created the housing mess while his wife, heir to General Growth Properties, the nation's second largest mall operator, filed the largest real estate bankruptcy ever.

GGP kept taking out loans, opening new malls, taking out new loans, opening even newer malls - hmm...doesn't that sound like a real estate bubble?

It does to me, and just like with residential housing, GGP's real estate story ended up in the red.

So when it comes to accountability and Tom Friedman, they just don't mix, you know?

Now today Little Tommy shills for education reform, parroting the crap we heard this week from Bill Gates and Arne Duncan about how teachers make too much money and ought to have their pay cut and tied only to test scores and performance-based data.

Given that Tom Friedman has been a hypocrite on his cheerleading for the Iraq war, a hypocrite in his call for all of us (except for himself, of course) to be environmentally conscious, and a hypocrite when he criticized Wall Street for the same unscrupulous business strategies that his wife's company pursued before going bankrupt, I'm going to say something to Little Tommy.

Hey, Tommy, Johnny Cash has something he wants to say to you:

Little Tommy Friedman Wants To Take Stuff From You

Like a livable wage, a 40 hour work week, vacation, health care, a pension and Social Security - but only for working and middle class folks, of course.

From Dean Baker at The American Prospect:

Thomas Friedman told readers that: "But now it feels as if we are entering a new era, 'where the great task of government and of leadership is going to be about taking things away from people,' said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum."

Unfortunately, Mr. Friedman apparently doesn't talk to anyone who has ever taken any economics. There are no serious forecasts that do not project that productivity will continue to grow for the indefinite future, and many project that productivity will grow at a more rapid pace than it did in the years from 1973-1995. This means that there is no reason, except incompetent economic management and/or the continuing upward redistribution of income, why the vast majority of the population should not experience improvements in living standards. This would mean an increase in both public and private services.

This is the meme that the corporate overlords have been selling for the last 20 years.

Times are tough and global competition is tough, so you are going to have to work longer and harder to make less money.

You're going to have to give up your 40 hour work week and employer-provided vacations and your employer-provided health care plan (if you're lucky enough to have one.)

You're going to have to delay your retirement and work longer and harder longer into your old age (but not at a good paying job, of course...you'll be laid off and stocking shelves at Walmart or delivering pizzas to college kids for those golden years...)

And that's if you can get a job at all. As the NY Times reported today, plenty of people who once lived middle class lives are unemployed, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

Now of course the folks at the top - the Bloombergs, the Gateses, the Blankfeins, the Philip Falcones of the world - they'll be raking in gobs more money, sucking up more of the world's resources - while you're losing your stuff.

And according to Little Tommy Friedman, who lives in a 4,000 square foot house in Washington and writes books about how great the Indian economic system and education systems are, says there's nothing we can do about it.

About all we can do is get used to the new reality and socialize our kids to expect to work longer and harder for a lot less than we ever had to.

And that, of course, is where education reform and the charter school movement that forces a 60 hour/6 day work week onto kids, comes into play.

And notice who is driving the education reform/charter movement - the Bloombergs, the Gateses, the Blankfeins and the Philip Falcones of the world.

And they have Little Tommy Friedman and others of his ilk to to sell their jive in the media.

It's all so perfect.

Unless people wake up to it.

The problem is not education, the problem is not the American workforce.

The problem is that the corporate overlords are crooks and have rigged the system for themselves.

You can see the latest Matt Taibbi article for just how easily they've done it.

Until something is done to take care of the Bloombergs, the Gateses, the Blankfeins and the Philip Falcones of the world and the shills who sell their jive like Little Tommy Friedman, things are only going to get worse for the working and middle classes.

You can see the anger over a lot of this in the Tea Party Movement or the nutcase flying his plane into the IRS building in Austin.

But of course the crazies are directing their anger at the wrong people.

Sure the IRS and the federal government are stealing your money and screwing you over and over - but they're doing it for the Bloombergs, the Gateses, the Blankfeins, and the Philip Falcones of the world.