In Washington, D.C., Mira Edmonds said her au pair’s arrival from France, which was scheduled for last Sunday, has been indefinitely delayed. Ms. Edmonds, who is a lawyer, and her husband work full-time and depend on child care for their two children, ages 3 and 6. “I don’t know how we’re going to cope if she isn’t here soon,” Ms. Edmonds said.
Shed a tear, my friends, shed a tear.
ALEC has an award for its favorite legislator. This is like, I don’t know, winning the award for the most horrible human being on the planet or something. Anyway, the winner, not surprisingly is an Art Pope lackey in North Carolina.
The rain in Spain won’t be falling mainly on the plain after all, at least not at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Tennessee-based research facility canceled what it had billed as a “Southern accent reduction” class amid employee backlash; for some staff, it came off as a little too “My Fair Lady: Appalachia.”
“Feel confident in a meeting when you need to speak with a more neutral American accent, and be remembered for what you say and not how you say it,” reads an email sent to thousands of staff members last week, advertising the new course. “In this course you will learn to recognize the pronunciation and grammar differences that make your speech sound Southern, and learn what to do so you can neutralize it through a technique called code-switching.”
The weekly course, set to run through mid-September, was offered on a voluntary basis only (with an $850 price tag). But some employees were insulted by the premise of the course and wording of the email, and complained. The lab subsequently called off the class.
David Keim, spokesman for Oak Ridge, which is the Energy Department’s biggest research facility and home to the Titan supercomputer, said the lab regularly offers accent modification classes for its many employees who are non-native English speakers. The lab employs some 4,400 people from 90 countries, as well as from across the U.S., and their work is highly technical. That makes professional development designed to help international researchers communicate more clearly and efficiently in high demand, he said.
Or Americans, especially the snotty elite classes not living in east Tennessee who are going to be interacting with ORNL employees, could just get over the idea of a proper accent and be OK with someone if their accent is from southern Appalachia, Rhode Island, Texas, or Minnesota. While obviously working with non-native speakers is a good idea that empowers the individual, embarrassing your employees because of where they are from and how they grew up makes the individual ashamed of themselves. Not everyone has to sound like they are on TV. This is real classism.
The reasons for the wave of child immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are complex, but as Óscar Martínez correctly states, many of them are related to the United States:
As thousands of children like Auner, Chele and Pitbull arrive at the US border, it is important to remember the role the United States has played in creating this mass migration. In the 1970s and ’80s, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were in the midst of either bloody civil wars or fierce government repression in which the United States played an iron-fisted role. Fearing the spread of communism in Latin America, the United States supported the autocratic military governments of these three countries, which in turn generated thousands of northbound migrants. Some of these migrants went on to join gangs in California. The 18th Street Gang and the Mara Salvatrucha were not formed in El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala but in the United States. Some fifty years ago, the 18th Street Gang splintered off from Clanton 14 in Southern California. The Mara Salvatrucha formed in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. At the end of the ’80s and the start of the ’90s, the United States deported close to 4,000 gang members. When they arrived back in Central America, they found fertile conditions in which to increase their numbers: countries devastated by war and poverty, with thousands upon thousands of corruptible and abandoned children.
But it would be an oversimplification to say that the flight of children to the United States is the product of violence alone.
Rubén Zamora is currently the Salvadoran ambassador to the UN and, until a month ago, El Salvador’s ambassador to the United States. With his replacement awaiting confirmation by the Salvadoran Senate, Zamora has been left to address the international implications of the child migrant crisis. Zamora explains that there is no single cause of the surge in child migrants. In addition to gang activity, Zamora says that the improving economic conditions experienced by Salvadoran migrants to the United States have acted as a draw. “From sharing a single room with a group of people, now some migrants can pay $1,000 a month and rent a two-bedroom apartment for themselves in the suburbs,” he says. And that means “more people can pay to bring their children to the US.”
Thousands of migrants from Central America are ineligible for temporary protected status—not because they’ve violated any law but because they missed the cutoff dates. The United States offers a mere 5,000 visas for low-skilled workers every year. For many, the only chance for gaining legal status in the United States is the asylum process, and it’s a long shot. Over the last few decades, in part as a response to the wave of Central American migrants fleeing the civil wars, the United States has narrowed the definition of who qualifies for asylum. Because most of those fleeing Central America are not doing so because of their “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” they are ineligible.
I recently asked two immigration lawyers from California and North Carolina how many requests for asylum they file each week. “At least ten,” they said. They’ve lost track of how many migrants they’ve represented over the years. But the tally of those who have been successful is easy to remember: none.
“Parents don’t see any chance of bringing their children legally to the US,” Zamora says, “so what options are left for them?”
Martínez is also correct on the point that the kids are not going to stop coming. There really is nothing the U.S. can do to stop this wave. It can make lives worse for the children fleeing violence to be reunited with their parents. It can militarize the border to all get-out. It can have coyotes extradited to the U.S. The kids are still going to come until a) gang violence ends in Central America and b) there is no reason for Central Americans to migrate to the U.S. without documentation.
And it’s worth reiterating the long-term damage U.S. Cold War policy had in poor nations around the world. The actions of Dulles and Eisenhower and Reagan and North destabilized these nations, creating conditions that continue to blowback to the U.S. today.
I guess I’m less than convinced that in this period of Republican extremism, the House GOP’s frivolous lawsuit against Obama is going to come back and bite them, certainly not to the point of being “politically disastrous.” Those who hate Obama love it. Those who hate the GOP are disgusted. For everyday people who don’t pay too much attention, it’s just another example of partisanship. If the GOP was to engage in another government shutdown or do something that actually affected people’s daily lives, sure. But unless they haul Obama before a court and make him look sympathetic on TV, I don’t see this as much of a difference-maker.
Yesterday’s decision by National Labor Relations Board general counsel Richard Griffin declaring corporations joint employers of the workers in their franchises is a big, big deal. Couple of key rundowns from Steven Greenhouse, Alec MacGillis, and Seth Michaels.
Effectively, Obama’s NLRB has moved the needle significantly toward some of the nation’s poorest and most exploited workers. It gives workers a significant legal tool in their fight for a $15 hourly wage in fast food and is likely to have a domino effect across the subcontracted, temporary, outsourced, and franchised economy. Corporations have spend decades coming up with shady labor practices in order to avoid responsibility for workers, leading to rampant exploitation of workers with no hope of rising toward a middle class. This ruling may well begin the process of changing that by taking away the incentives for corporations to not directly hire their workers. Of course, an appeal is coming and so there is a long ways to go and many fights still to come.
In other words, both parties are the same and Rand Paul is the only progressive alternative in 2016.
One album I recommend very highly is Lydia Loveless’ Somewhere Else. This young, talented singer from Ohio is definitely someone to check out if you haven’t yet. If you haven’t heard her, this NPR performance is a good place to start, although quite a bit more subdued than her album. I read somewhere that her dad was in the band for awhile, but too many of her songs were about sex so it was too weird. Another excellent musician from southern Ohio as well, which seems to generate a whole lot of underrated music.
Living in Rhode Island, with one of the nation’s worst brewing scenes, the answer is absolutely not, but even when I am in paradise Oregon, the answer is still no. Yet some are concerned.
Located off Rhode Island’s coast, the Atlantic Ocean isle is filled with bluffs, beaches, and rolling hills, such as the one atop which the Atlantic Inn is perched. Here, on the lush lawn in front of the 1879 hotel, you can sit in white Adirondack chairs and watch the rippled waters. Or, on a recent summer morning, you could plop beside Dogfish Head president Sam Calagione and discuss craft beer’s coming bottleneck.
“We’re heading into an incredibly competitive era of craft brewing,” he says. “There’s a bloodbath coming.”
This may seem alarmist. After all, the Brewers Association just announced that 3,000-plus craft breweries now operate in America. Last year’s craft sales climbed 17.2 percent, overseas exports have escalated, and breweries such as Lagunitas, Sierra Nevada, and Oskar Blues recently constructed second breweries to spread their bitter ales farther, wider, and fresher. Heck, Stone is building a brewery in Berlin. Berlin!
I’m onboard with America abandoning middle-of-the-road beer and exploring flavorful new directions. The highway, however, is getting mighty crowded. Hundreds of different beers debut weekly, creating a scrum of session IPAs, spiced witbiers, and barrel-aged stouts scuffling for shelf space. For consumers, the situation is doubly confusing. How can you pick a pint on a 100-brew tap list? Moreover, beer shops are chockablock with pale this and imperial that, each one boasting a different hop pun. When buying beer, I can’t count how many times I’ve assisted overwhelmed shoppers, playing the benevolent Sherpa in the wilds of modern brewing.
I was unaware that picking a beer off a taplist of 100 was a problem. This mostly sounds like a bunch of established brewers worried that newcomers are going to break into their market. Of course, there are some legitimate points. There’s a lot of gimmicks around right now. And if you are a newby to the world of craft beer, there’s no question that it can be totally overwhelming. But that situation can be solved pretty quickly with a relatively small amount of experimentation. Or at the very least you can find something you like and stick with. The stupid label wars, as many breweries begin to rely on cheap marketing tactics over quality, is annoying, but hardly worse than some wineries. And I don’t recall people complaining about too many wines on the market even though when I go to Bottles in Providence there are hundreds of different wines in the store.
I suppose there is a cap on the craft beer market. What I hope happens is that it is a race to the top, with lower quality brewers going out of existence. What probably happens is that conglomerates start buying up some of the brands. But even that doesn’t begin to touch the real small-time brewers opening tap rooms and small bars with relatively limited ambition. That is a great thing and just because Dogfish Head executives don’t like the competition doesn’t mean it is going away.
Tyler Cowen’s solutions to poverty would not have been original in 1890:
You and other thinkers on the right have proposed that cultural factors play a large role in the widening income gap. What are you suggesting?
Note that the observed stagnation in earnings has plagued male earners, not women. Women continue to do better in the work force and also in education, or if they choose not to advance this is often a voluntary decision, linked to childbearing.
Men are perhaps better suited for old-style manufacturing jobs, and women are often better suited for service sector jobs. A lot of men seem to have problems with discipline and conscientiousness.
If we are looking for a remedy, a greater interest in strict religions would help many of the poor a lot — how about Mormonism for a start? Just look at the data. Many other religions prohibit or severely limit alcohol, drugs and gambling. That said, this has to happen privately rather than as a matter of state policy.
Cowen would fit in the Gilded Age quite well. Between his gender stereotypes and his telling the poor to live morally upright religious lives to succeed, thus blaming them for their own poverty if they don’t, Cowen sounds like he’s taken a time machine from the late 19th century. Andrew Carnegie could have used this guy. He goes on to talk about how income inequality is actually a “red herring.” I’m sure the people of the south Texas colonias, Detroit, and Youngstown would totally agree. Their poverty totally isn’t real.
These are the solutions to income inequality that I have no doubt the plutocrats funding him at George Mason love to hear. But telling poor people to convert to Mormonism is, to say the bloody least, not even part of a solution to poverty.
….Cowen’s “ideas” remind me of what I’m seeing here in Oaxaca. The cop cars (and the civilian cars the cops drive somewhat oddly since it tells everyone they are cops) all have bumperstickers saying things like “TRABAJO.” Which means work for those of you with even less Spanish than I have (luckily my wife is nearly fluent). I mean, that’s a great idea. Let’s not provide any jobs. But telling people to work through bumperstickers, that’s sure to fight crime!
I don’t often comment on specific academic jobs but this really stuck in my craw. At Arizona State University:
The School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies (SHPRS) at Arizona State University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor specializing in the history of capitalism and political economy in Europe and/or the United States, from the 18th century to the present. Anticipated start date: August 2015. In addition being a member of the School’s history faculty, the successful candidate will be affiliated with the Center for Political Thought and Leadership at ASU, working closely with colleagues in program development and advancing the Center’s involvement in the wider community in Phoenix and Arizona.
Required qualifications:
Ph.D. in History or an appropriately adjacent field, specializing in the history of capitalism and political economy in Europe and/or the United States, 18th-century to the present, at the time of appointment.
Desired qualifications:
Broad command of the economic, political, and intellectual history of capitalism and political economy, in modern Europe and/or the United States
Demonstrated ability to teach introductory, upper-division, and graduate courses in the above fields, as evidenced in cover letter and CV
Research focus on (a) the relations between free-market institutions and political liberty in modern history; (b) on the contribution of economic theories and ideologies to the formation of public policy related to major sectors of modern economies such as industry, healthcare, housing education and related topics; or (c) on the intellectual history of the leading normative principles of modern political economy–economic freedom, growth and efficiency; distributive justice; political liberty, and constitutionalism.
In other words, tell us how awesome you think capitalism is if you want this job. I was immediately suspicious–”the relations between free-market instituitons and political liberty”???–and asked around. Well, who do you send the CV to? Noted Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly fan Donald Critchlow. See this Reddit thread Critchlow did that begins with him criticizing “revisionist” history that focuses on race as a start to his politics.
Critchlow was hired to head the new Center for Political Thought and Leadership at ASU. That sure sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not:
The center has already received significant external support. It will house the Jack Miller Library on Constitutional Principles, a significant collection of classical books on political liberty and fundamental principles at the heart of American civic, cultural and constitutional life, and the Journal of Policy History, a peer-reviewed academic quarterly focused on the application of historical perspectives to public policy studies. The Miller Center is a non-profit, non-partisan and non-sectarian organization dedicated to the support of scholarship, teaching and study of the central ideas and themes of American history and the broader traditions of Western Civilization.
Additionally, a five-year grant providing up to $1.129 million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation, an organization that supports research and educational programs focused on exploring the sources of well-being, will provide seed funding for the center. A post-doctoral program, faculty-student community workshops, a lecture program, student reading groups and library will offer many of the center’s activities.
Heck, why not name this the Charles Koch Chair in Corporate Hackery! And here I thought conservatives couldn’t get jobs in academia. I wonder if ASU has decided to keep this fair and balanced by allowing the CPUSA to host a center and use Venezuelan oil money to fund a position?
So the Center for Political Thought and Leadership should at least try to be relatively objective in its presentation of material, right? The center is just opening. So who is giving its opening keynote address in January? Rich Lowry! Well, you know that is going to be great. Was Dinesh D’Souza not available? Bill Kristol too busy urging policy makers to bomb brown nations?
Very nice Arizona State University. Congratulations on giving up on even the pretense of integrity by accepting Koch money to start an extremist center dedicated to serving the needs of billionaires. And I don’t know what role the History department had in this choice, but I for one would be far beyond disgusted were I a member of the department and I’d speak out about it.
Beaches are indeed pretty unpleasant.
Hot, boring, and gross is not a great combo for me. Give me a rocky coastline and tide pools any day. Or some mountains.
This is your late night thread on me asserting my aesthetic preferences are objectively correct.
Request in comments for picture of hiking at Mt. St. Helens, a far cooler experience than the beach, granted.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
