Higher Ed. Racket: How Kids Are Paying a Fortune for Rip-off 'Prestige' Educations

By Daniel Luzer, Washington Monthly
Posted on September 2, 2010, Printed on September 2, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/148031/

In the summer of 1961, a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from rural Nevada packed up his young family and moved to Washington, D.C. He took a job working nights as a U.S. Capitol policeman while by day he studied for a law degree in Foggy Bottom, at a local commuter school by the name of George Washington University.

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Overworked and Underpaid? Productivity Increases, But Wage Growth Declines

by Akito Yoshikane

As Labor Day approaches, many Americans are breathing a sigh of relief for the extra day off. On a day that celebrates unions and the eight-hour work day, many workers are feeling like their hard work isn’t exactly paying off the way it used to.

Even as productivity has continued to climb, wages have been either stagnant or declining. Household income for the average working family has continued to fall, but men, latinos and those without a college education have experienced an especially sharp deceleration of wage growth since the recession, according to a new briefing paper by the Economic Policy Institute.

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Internet Hate Speech: Rampant and Unregulated

New America Media / By Denzel Codrington

The Internet has opened a portal for discussions on various matters. People from around the world discuss various issues on message boards and through comment sections on news stories. It's a wonderful thing when people have the opportunity to discuss world events in an open forum almost instantly regardless of their location. Websites like Facebook and CNN streamed the inauguration of Barack Obama instantly allowing people to express their feelings on that historic day.

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Calif. Hotel Walk-Off Strike Continues New Wave of Worker Militancy

Published on Thursday, August 26, 2010 by In These Times

by Micah Uetricht

The Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, Calif., bears a number of similarities to workplaces around the country.

Like other workers around the country, employees there say they're getting squeezed. They're expected to do more with less: fewer supplies, fewer breaks, and less money. Like the vast majority of American workers, they're not unionized. Company-wide profits, however, seem to be doing okay.

But in a move rarely seen since the Great Depression, Embassy Suites workers went on strike early this month over alleged lost wages. Although as nonunion workers they had few legal rights to protect their actions, they were united and angry. On August 9, workers walked off the job and formed a picket line at the hotel's entrance.

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Fallout of Hate Is Spreading Across America from "Ground Zero"

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

The hysteria over a planned Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan is only the tip of the iceberg.

Scientists building the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos referred to the coordinates where a test device was detonated as “point zero.” When the horror of nuclear warfare was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the term “Ground Zero” entered our lexicon. The expression has come to mean the epicenter of a catastrophic event, be it a nuclear detonation, a disease epidemic or an earthquake. It is the point from which damage spreads, whether it’s radioactive fallout or a deadly contagion.

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How the Fox-Comcast Machine Crushed a Journalist Who Spoke Out Against Bill O'Reilly

Columbia Journalism Review / By Terry Ann Knopf

Whenever they say ‘it’s not about the money,’ it is about the money.”
- Fred W. Friendly

It was a balmy Saturday––a perfect night for champagne toasts. Some 450 people from the local television industry gathered in the Grand Ballroom at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, many of the men in tuxedos, the women in strapless gowns. The occasion was a dinner ceremony on May 10, 2008, to announce the local Emmy-award winners. Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray was on hand, as were bigwigs from the Boston/New England chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

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Google & Verizon's Evil Plan Is Really Bad News for Regular Intern

AlterNet / By Scott Thill

If we wake up one day to an Internet that has a carpool lane for the upper class, it's worth thinking about the alternative.

The firestorm over tech giant Google and telco titan Verizon's self-interested proposal to arbitrarily codify a pay-to-play Internet will dominate the news in the coming months, as net neutrality steps onto a mainstream media stage crowded with Muslim mosques and other distracting fodder. But now that other telcos like warrantless wiretapper AT&T have quickly endorsed Googlezon's proposal, it was left to Jon Stewart on a recent episode of the Daily Show to sum up the mammoth migraine awaiting us all: "We're fucked."

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What do we Net from the Net Neutrality Deal?

By Mitchell Jay Rabin

Host of A Better World 

Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 pm

For those of you who don't know the phrase "net neutrality", it refers to the fact that all websites are accessible at the same rate per the service provider one is using. That is, it's not faster for IBM to come up than it is for A Better World to be accessed. That's fair, equitible and "neutral".

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“A FILM UNFINISHED:” IN AN UNFINISHED WORLD:

A Holocaust Documentary Raises Questions about What We See And What We Know

By Danny Schechter
Author of the Crime Of Our Time

A very old movie was offered up as something very new at New York’s Film Forum, as an unfinished Nazi propaganda film shot just before I was born became the subject of an Israeli filmmaker’s dissection titled A Film Unfinished.  It’s a film about a film, footage from which has been used in legitimate documentaries to show what the Ghetto was like,  but,  as we came to see, some of it  was staged and is illegitimate.

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10 Shameless Right-Wing Tributes to Ayn Rand That Should Make Any Sane Person Blush

AlterNet / By Roy Edroso

As the evangelical Right's influence has declined, conservatives are adhering to another religion -- one based on the scribblings of a sociopath.

Up until a few years ago, right-wingers who needed to believe in something larger than themselves chose Jesus. But with the evangelicals fading from the Republican coalition, and Obama's social programs making the whole "compassionate conservative" thing suspect, it look like Jesus is out and Ayn Rand is in.

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The Internet Belongs to Us -- Tell the FCC to Stop the Dangerous Google/Verizon Deal

Center for Media Justice / By Amalia Deloney and Joshua Breitbart

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski seems to see his role as a broker among corporate interests, not as their regulator. This has to change.

On August 19, the Federal Communications Commission will be in Minneapolis for a public hearing on the future of the Internet. The big question now looming over this hearing is whether the fate of the Internet has already been decided behind closed doors before the FCC has even heard what the public has to say.

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Meet the Educators Fighting to Restore a Sense of Civic Duty in School Kids

The following is an excerpt from The Death of "Why?": The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy by Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Copyright 2009 Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Reprinted with permission by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Nancy Gannon is not an ideologue, an America hater, or an activist determined to recruit revolutionaries to her cause. She's just a high school principal.

She's a principal in one of the toughest places to be a principal: the New York City public school system. Yet, despite the enormous challenges of educating children in a city where only slightly more than half of all ninth graders graduate high school, Nancy's mission goes beyond securing as many diplomas as possible.

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Why Are Young People Moving Back in With Their Parents?

Psychotherapy Networker / By Martha Straus

Individuation and financial autonomy have long been the ideals for successful maturity, but current times necessitate changing our ideas about what it means to "grow up."

In the spring of 1973, a couple of months before I left for college, my parents moved into a one-bedroom apartment. I have no traumatic memories of this event, and I don't recall worrying that anyone might have thought it odd at the time. Young people my age were expected to leave the parental nest, so downsizing made perfect sense. But now when I speak about it, people are astonished. Many express sympathy; some even pity me. These days, my own daughter, Lizzy, a recent college graduate living 200 miles away, is dismayed when she learns that I've allowed guests to sleep in her sacred bedroom.

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Wikileaks Did More to Impact the Afghan War Than 9 Years of Corporate Journalism

Other Words / By Peter Hart

For the last few years, the war in Afghanistan seemed to be an afterthought in the U.S. media.

For the last few years, the war in Afghanistan seemed to be an afterthought in the U.S. media. That all changed in a hurry with the publication of tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents by the website WikiLeaks.

Those files were shared with several newspapers, each of which published extensive reports offering their interpretations of the documents. Suddenly, the chaos and violence of the Afghanistan War was back on the front pages and leading the network newscasts.

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Bradley Manning: An American Hero

by Stephen Lendman

Manning, of course, is the courageous Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, who admitted leaking:

-- "260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a (US) airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year," and

-- an "explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency" - "collateral murder" he felt obligated to expose.

It got him in trouble. On June 7, the military in Iraq arrested him, saying:

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In States Where "Gun Ed" Is Prevalent, Comprehensive Sex Ed Is Nowhere to Be Found

AlterNet / By Lisa Russ

Genitals, unlike guns, are in 100% of households. Why not use the same approach -- that knowledge is power -- and give our kids straight forward, age appropriate information?

Seems to me that simple, clear communication works best, even with young kids. When there is a threat or an opportunity I let my kids know in plain and simple terms.  No running with scissors.  Walk carefully near the edge of a pool.  Put the matches down.  So far this plain-talking strategy has kept ER visits to a minimum and led to a relatively peaceful life with 2 pre-schoolers.

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Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

Posted by oleoleolson at 4:40 am

August 5, 2010

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”
-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

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A Lesson from "Inception": How the Right-Wing and Corporate Media Brainwash Americans

AlterNet / By David Sirota

The illusions spread by both the right-wing and corporate media are deftly presented as fact; can we ever wake up?

For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions and "Alice in Wonderland" allusions, the new film "Inception" adds something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality’s authenticity -- something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion. In the movie’s tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas when they are wrong? 

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"You Need to Know What's Really Going On": WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the Fight for the Truth

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / By Ron Synovitz and Christopher Schwartz

Assange: "In order to make any just decision you need to know and understand what abuses or plans for abuses are occurring."

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks, says his work is based on the "ancient vision" of uncovering the truth. And he says sources would rather turn over their information to him than to traditional news outlets because he can protect them better. Assange spoke with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Ron Synovitz and Christopher Schwartz on July 27 by phone from London.

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US jobless claims fall unexpectedly

New claims for US unemployment benefits fell unexpectedly last week to 457,000, down 2.4 percent from the previous week, the Labor Department said.

Unemployed Americans attend a National Career Fair at the Airport Radisson Hotel as they search for work in Los Angeles on July 19. New claims for US unemployment benefits fell unexpectedly last week to 457,000, down 2.4 percent from the previous week, the Labor Department said.

Jobless claims fell by 11,000 in the week ending July 24, down substantially from the 464,000 level expected by analysts.

The jobless figures were lower, in part, thanks to fewer layoffs at car plants in Michigan and New York.

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