Chicago Mayor Richard Daley this week called for an end to the “open
door” admissions policy at Chicago City Colleges, citing concerns about
the cost of remedial courses and a desire to build a quality program.
Every year, the system spends about $30 million for remedial
classes—about 6 percent of its $457.5 million budget. Daley suggested
that a better approach might be to offer programs through alternative
high schools to get students up to speed before they enter college.
Is this a sign of things to come?

Let’s pretty much give away our parking meter revenue but change one of the best aspects of community colleges for 6% of the budget. No reason why we should help limit the steps that enable secondary education so that more people have access to higher paying careers that go back into powering our economy, let’s just send them back to the places that failed them.

bollywoodsuperstar:

Jane Mayer’s excellent new article in The New Yorker, on the infamous Koch brothers and their funding of libertarian politics. Must-read.

What I don’t get about these people is how they can claim a pride in their country when they want to do away with the very things that help present a national unit; social programs and everything else that ensures massive amounts of people don’t fall through the cracks. Who’s gonna be left to build your industry for very little money? Scratch that, I know why they claim it, I just don’t understand how people buy it so easily.

The NYT focuses on warehouses in Chicago and the employees that are hired via temp agencies that bank off the desperation of the working class and the greed of corporations.

A study released Aug. 16 by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Warehouse Workers for Justice found that 81 percent of new hires and 63 percent of all workers in warehouses were temporary employees; they earned a median $9 an hour while direct-hires earned $12. One in five warehouse workers have been hurt on the job, it found, and a third of them did not report their injury for fear of being punished or fired. A third of those who did report an injury said they suffered retaliation.

This happens in every area of industry. Temporary is a misnomer, these jobs aren’t the least bit temporary. Think of how many people you know that are or were at some point professional temp workers. Agencies are doing just fine in this economy and yet tons of people are struggling to make ends meet with temp job after temp job, which means we need to limit temp industry behavior already. Fuck free market ideology.

In the past few decades, workers have generally lost ground against employers in negotiating terms of employment. Defined-benefit pension plans have been replaced by 401(k)s, and then employers sometimes cut the matching contributions. A smaller percentage of private-sector jobs today come with health insurance, while many workers who have insurance have to pay more for it. Given globalization, the furious pace of mergers and acquisitions, and continuous cost pressures, job security is increasingly tenuous. And so the main thing employees—and potential employees—look at when evaluating their current jobs and potential offers is wages. And here, too, corporate America hasn’t been delivering. The median income in 2008 was below what it was in 1998.

via newsweek:

Employers shouldn’t be surprised that Americans won’t take their crummy, low-wage jobs. Dan Gross’s latest column.

Take bagging or checking groceries for instance; in Illinois it’s a minimum wage job, no benefits, with part time minimal hours. And it’s unionized through SEIU. So in exchange for that raw deal workers would pay an initiation fee between $100-200 and as well as infinite weekly fees. This is why a lot of grocery stores are always hiring, no one stays for one of the big ripoffs of the working class.

Neel Kashkari wrote a hilarious op-ed for WaPo:

Cutting entitlement spending requires us to think beyond what is in our own immediate self-interest. But it also runs against our sense of fairness: We have, after all, paid for entitlements for earlier generations. Is it now fair to cut my benefits? No, it isn’t. But if we don’t focus on our collective good, all of us will suffer.

By ‘us’ of course he means middle America, not the megabanks he bailed out with billions and billions of our dollars in 2009 via TARP.

bailing out the financial system went directly against our shared beliefs in free markets and fair play. While the vast majority of Americans did not cause the financial crisis, we all had to sacrifice to stop it. Such a cultural violation has angered people nationwide, which makes cutting entitlements more difficult because it will again betray our sense of fairness.

In one breath he admits the bailout went against (and disproved the strength of) his beloved free market system, that it damaged those not responsible for the disaster, that those not responsible still paid for it and then suggests ‘we’ start digging into the few social protections that we have anyway (and that we pay for). They pulled one over on us before, why not again? That loose change and pocket lint you managed to hang onto after getting jumped? Uh, hand it over for the greater good because as you’ve well learned, Wall Street isn’t going to do shit for the greater good besides pen these op-eds suggesting the plebs suck it up and live on cat food. It’s sooo bad I wonder if he accidentally pasted a piece of internal memo in this.

Now behind a desk at PIMCO, a bond giant that got rescued by the bailout, he sees social security programs as the #1 unnecessary drain on our economy. Begging us to give it up for the greater good as he, his employer and every other psychopath of their ilk laugh and circle jerk onto a map of the country as they have been since they convinced the world they were too big to accept the consequences of their scammy financial decisions. This more than anything shows how used to getting away with robbery these people are, how embedded they are in our govt, how it won’t stop anytime soon and how comfortable they are lying to the public. That they could publish (and fuck you again, WaPo) an op-ed accusing the have-nots of having too much is just priceless (actually it’s worth at least $700 billion). This all makes the op-ed footnote insanely juxtaposing with its truth:

The writer, a managing director of the investment management firm PIMCO, served as an assistant Treasury secretary during the George W. Bush administration. He led the Office of Financial Stability and ran the Troubled Assets Relief Program until May 2009.