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Clinton ‘beholden to scumbags’

By
Steve Balich
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  by Sam Rolley

Liberal journalist: Clinton ‘beholden to scumbags’

bill and hillary clintonDescribing the Clinton Global Initiative’s events as “creepy,” a journalist and onetime moderator for forums hosted by the foundation says there’s no doubt the Clintons sold access.
“I’ve spent a decent amount of time at the Clinton Global Initiative,” Davidson said during a podcast for Slate.
He continued:

And there is a real creepy vibe, to me, personally, at the Clinton Global Initiative.
It seems, to me, that it is all about buying access. It is incredibly expensive just to go to the thing … and there are sort-of these explicit ways in which you get access. You pay more money to get more access to political leaders and to really rich people and to big corporate leaders.
There’s this kinda creepy theatre that happens where you have the CEO of Coca-Cola or IBM or whatever or GE up there with President Clinton and they’re just bathing each other in love over how generous and wonderful they are and how much they care about the world and all these earnest people applauding and thrilled.

After concluding that “it really feels gross,” Davidson said his opinion of the organization hasn’t hurt his view of Clinton as a presidential candidate.
“I can’t wait to vote for her,” Davidson said. “If I had time I’d go move to Missouri or Ohio or somewhere so my vote could actually count.”



Consumer groups sue over those phony natural labels

By
Steve Balich
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dont-be-fooled-by-natural-labeling-800x600
Posted on by Sam Rolley
A group of three consumer protection advocates filed a lawsuit against General Mills over claims that some of its products contain only natural ingredients.
Moms Across America, Beyond Pesticides and the Organic Consumers Association with the Richman Law Group filed the suit.
According to the complaint, General Mills mislabels several of its popular granola bars as “made with 100% natural whole grain oats.”
According to the complaint: “The oat products at issue are not ‘made with 100% Natural whole grain oats,’ but instead the oats contain the chemical glyphosate, a potent biocide and human endocrine disruptor, with detrimental health effects that are still becoming known.”
“No reasonable consumer, seeing these representations, would expect that the oats or any ingredients in the products to contain something that is unnatural.”
We’ve told you before about corporations using “natural” labeling to sell chemical-laden foods to unwitting consumers.
Basically, “natural” means the product was made using ingredients found on earth — which can include some 10,000 unhealthy additives.
Big food manufacturers are increasingly mislabeling foods containing dangerous ingredients and harmful chemicals as healthy, natural options—and American shoppers are being fooled daily.
Research just released from Consumer Reports shows that last year about 62 percent of Americans opted to buy so-called “natural” foods, believing they were free of genetically modified organisms, artificial ingredients and colors, chemicals and pesticides.
Unfortunately, that simply isn’t true.

No Liberty without Virtue

By
Steve Balich
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0

SUNDAY, APRIL 3, 2011

No Liberty without Virtue

Washington, Jeffereson, & Madison institute

To our Founding Fathers it was obvious, or “self-evident,” that self-government, or a democratic republic, could only be perpetuated by the self-governed.  Reflecting these precepts, a contemporary German writer to the Founders, J. W. von Goethe, stated: “What is the best government? — That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”[1] And, a later, prominent 19th Century minister, Henry Ward Beecher, simply said: “There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.”[2] Self-governance consists of self-regulation of our behavior, ambitions and passions.  To this end, the Founders fundamentally believed that the ability to govern ourselves rests with our individual and collective virtue (or character).
John Adams stated it this way, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation ofRepublics.”[3] In this regard, the revolutionary war was as much a battle against “the corruption of 18th century British high society,”[4] as it was against financial oppression.  While the Founders and American colonists were very concerned with their civil liberty and economic freedom, demanding “no taxation without representation,” they were equally concerned with their religious liberty, particularly in preserving their rights of individual conscience and public morality.[5]  With respect to the vital need for virtue in order to establish and maintain a republic, the Founders were in complete harmony:
George Washington said: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,”[6] and “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.”[7]
Benjamin Franklin said: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” [8]
James Madison stated: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”[9]
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and … their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice … These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”[10]
Samuel Adams said: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.  He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”[11]
Patrick Henry stated that: “A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”[12]
John Adams stated: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[13]
Virtue ennobles individual character and lifts society as a whole. Virtuous principles eschew prejudice and discrimination, confirming that “all men are created equal.” Virtue encompasses characteristics of goodwill, patience, tolerance, kindness, respect, humility, gratitude, courage, honor, industry, honesty, chastity and fidelity. These precepts serve as the cornerstones for both individual and societal governance.
[1] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, translated by Bailey Saunders (MacMillan & Co., New York, 1906), Maxim No. 225.
[2] William Drysdale,ed., Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, Selected from the Writings and Sayings of Henry Ward Beecher (D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1887), p. 72.
[3] John Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 16, 1776. A. Koch and W. Peden, eds., The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams (Knopf, New York, 1946), p. 57.
[4] Marvin Olasky, Fighting for Liberty and Virtue (Regnery Publishing, Washinton D.C., 1996) p. 142.
[5] See, e.g., Id., Olasky, Fighting for Liberty and Virtue; Richard Vetterli and Gary Bryner,In Search of the Republic: Public Virtue and the Roots of American Government (Rowman & Littlefield, New Jersey, 1987).
[6] Victor Hugo Paltsits, Washington’s Farewell Address (The New York Public Library, 1935), p. 124.
[7] Washington to Marquis De Lafayette, February 7, 1788, John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, (U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington D. C., 1939), 29:410.
[8] Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, (Tappan, Whittemore and Mason, Boston, 1840), 10:297.
[9] Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 20, 1788. Jonathan Elliot, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution (J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, 1891) 3:536.
[10] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:234.
[11] William V. Wells, The Life and Public Service of Samuel Adams (Little, Brown, & Co., Boston, 1865), 1:22.
[12] Tryon Edwards, D.D., The New Dictionary of Thoughts – A Cyclopedia of Quotations(Hanover House, Garden City, NY, 1852; revised and enlarged by C.H. Catrevas, Ralph Emerson Browns and Jonathan Edwards, 1891; The Standard Book Company, New York, 1955, 1963), p. 337.
[13] John Adams, October 11, 1798, letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, (Little, Brown, and Co., Boston, 1854), 9:229

Without law, liberty becomes licentiousness

By
Steve Balich
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0

Without law, liberty becomes licentiousness

Posted on by Bob LivingstonViews: 2,004

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Gavel with broken handleThe public has been trained to think in terms of what is legal and what is illegal. The politicians and their elite bosses operate above the law and outside the law. For them, legal is what they say it is or is not.
Hillary Clinton personifies the system. The FBI and Department of (In)Justice – or, as some call it, the Department of Just Us – have always given the Clinton crime family a pass to operate outside the law. But it is not just them.
Politicians, bureaucrats, judges and their friends are untouchables. Yes, occasionally one or two are sacrificed on the altar in the name of “justice,” but it is nothing more than a ruse that keeps the system in place.
There are clearly privileged classes in America. It is those in political power backed by illegal police power. They act against the people outside the law and the Constitution. It has become so obvious.
The system is now beyond resolution. We are in the final stages of economic, social and moral collapse.
To anyone who has studied history, this is no surprise. The Founding Fathers had much to say about it.
In “Of the Study of the Law in the United States,” James Wilson wrote in 1790:

Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

In 1774 in “Emblematic Representations,” Benjamin Franklin wrote:

The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy.

In Novanglus No. 7, John Adams wrote in 1777:

They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men.

In a letter to David Ramsey written in 1786, Benjamin Rush said:

[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community.

Who can honestly say we remain a nation of laws and not men? We are governed by an evil and licentious oligarchy.
 

Madigan power stems from controlling the map/ Who votes in which District

By
Steve Balich
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In a 4-3 ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court erased from November ballots a referendum on legislative mapmaking, and handed a major victory to Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan Aug. 25.
In its ruling, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the July 20 decision from Cook County Circuit Court Judge Diane Larsen.
This stands as the second time in the last three years that Madigan’s top lawyer, Michael Kasper, has successfully sued to stop mapmaking reform in its tracks.
The referendum in question came after the nonpartisan Independent Maps coalition filed 570,000 signatures with the Illinois State Board of Elections in May. If successful, it would have shrunk the speaker’s influence in legislative map drawing by putting that process in the hands of a broad coalition, rather than the winner-take-all system that has followed the census each decade since 1970.
A career made on maps
It is through that system that Madigan first rose to power.
After the 1980 census, an eight-member panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans was charged with remapping Illinois’ legislative districts. But the panel failed to come to an agreement. To break the gridlock, a ninth member of the panel was drawn at random.
In an almost mythical fashion, the name was chosen out of a top hat worn by Abraham Lincoln.
The name drawn was that of former Democratic Gov. Sam Shapiro. That made Madigan, then House minority leader, mapmaker-in-chief.
His map was unlike anything the state had ever seen.
While demographic trends in Chicago and surrounding suburbs spelled disaster for his party, Madigan’s first map led to a Democratic rout in the 1982 elections.
He gifted Chicago six more House seats and three more Senate seats than its population dictated. And, after voters ratified a constitutional cutback amendment trimming the ranks of the Illinois House, Madigan’s map ensured 43 of the 59 eliminated seats belonged to the GOP.
“He is a political wizard,” the Chicago Tribune editorial board wrote Dec. 18, 1981.
State lawmakers quickly showed their appreciation by electing him to the speakership in 1983.
“Many of them know they wouldn’t even be in the General Assembly if it weren’t for the heavily Democratic map of legislative districts that Madigan crafted in 1981…,” the Tribune reported in a 1989 retrospective.
Madigan has held that position of power for 31 of the past 33 years.
Controversy
Madigan’s biggest political accomplishment was not without its detractors, however. A three-member panel of federal judges, for example, was displeased.
They found Madigan’s map, which extended certain city districts into predominantly white areas to save Democrat seats, unconstitutionally diluted black voting strength in Chicago.
That ruling stood as the first time a northern state had found the Democratic Party guilty of intentional discrimination against minorities, according to the Tribune.
A year later, those legislative boundaries in question were still up for grabs, and Madigan was worried. Reportedly at his request, the U.S. District Court removed a requirement for the map to be published, because Madigan didn’t want his name on the court battle.
He was considering a run for governor. And he was scared of being labeled a racist.
“It’s a travesty,” then-state Rep. Carol Mosley-Braun, D-Chicago, told the Tribune in 1983. “Mike did draw the map, and he’s got to live with that. It’s just that simple.”
Madigan has drawn the state’s legislative map twice more since then, after the 2000 and 2010 censuses.
The 2012 elections saw a new district splintering Decatur and Springfield by race, connecting areas of the two cities containing more black voters. It was Madigan’s doing, and it worked. That tinkering let Democrats pick up a Senate seat and a House seat they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Due to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibiting drawing borders “primarily” to create minority districts, House Democrats had to argue in federal court that they drew the district this way for partisan reasons.
As if there were any question.
The power of the map
Much of Madigan’s Statehouse success is predicated on his use of the map.
But the system he’s protected, wherein politicians get to choose their voters, has led to a lack of competitive elections, and an equally distressing lack of confidence in state government.
The current legislative districting system leaves a majority of Illinoisans without a real choice in their elected officials. Less than 40 percent of Illinois’ legislative races in 2016 will be contested.
True mapmaking reform would mean fewer politically “safe” districts, fewer tortured shapes and loads more transparency. All three require getting politicians out of the cartography business.

Austin Berg
Writer Illinois Policy

Man chestfeeding baby

By
Steve Balich
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0

The Fabulist Fourth Estate and “Chestfeeding” Fake Men

The Fabulist Fourth Estate and “Chestfeeding” Fake Men
Written By Laurie Higgins  |   08.26.16
Fabulist: a liar or someone who invents and tells dishonest stories
(*CAUTION: Not for younger readers*)
Perhaps you’ve been living in the real world—and by real, I mean the world that actually exists, where actual science matters, where language exists that corresponds to objective phenomena, where truth is valued more than subjective feelings, and where life is yet enveloped in a cozy blanket of freedom.
Because of your immersion in reality, perhaps you’ve been blissfully unaware that an alternate ontological, epistemological, teleological, and moral universe has sprung up in our midst. Let’s call it Wonderland. No, that’s too much fun. Let’s call itOceania. Oceania has its own language whose purposes are to obfuscate reality and compel linguistic, political, social, and religious obeisance to the gods of sexual deviance who now rule. That language is Newspeak.
Who speaks Newspeak? Leftists of every color of the rainbow. Perversion-activists, academicians, public school teachers, political leaders, physicians, psychologists, attorneys, actors, musicians, novelists, and members of the fabulist Fourth Estate.
While you’ve been living relatively peaceful lives suffused with liberty and reality, you may have felt some disturbances in the created universe that you dismissed as kind of icky but ultimately trivial. I mean, that’s what our political leaders—always the founts of wisdom—keep telling us abut the so-called “social issues.”
Well, prepare for the incursion. Dark unreality is poised to break through in ways so profound that your comforting blankets of freedom will be torn asunder.
A recent piece in the formerly respectable The Atlantic illustrates the idiocy of leftist journalists who have packed up their computers and moved lock, stock, and poison pens to Oceania. The article titled “What it’s Like to Chestfeed” and subtitled “The many obstacles trans men and other transmasculine people run into when feeding infants” is infused with delusional, deceitful leftist rhetoric itself informed by anti-science leftist ideology.
The article profiles a chemically induced bearded lady who mutilated her body in a futile effort to convince herself and the world that she is in reality a man. This woman, “Trevor” MacDonald, is legally married to a man. She’s had a double-mastectomy, which removed milk ducts and glandular tissue, but she left her nether region and internal female organs intact. In 2010, she stopped taking testosterone so that she and her husband who “identifies” as “gay” could have children the old-fashioned way. She and her husband now have two children, a 5-year-old and an 18-month-old. Here’s an excerpt from the deceitful Atlantic article:

When Trevor MacDonald started chestfeeding about five years ago, he didn’t know anyone who had attempted it, nor had any of his doctors ever encountered someone who had. In fact, he was shocked that his body could even produce milk. As a trans man—someone who was assigned female at birth but has transitioned to identifying as male—he was born with the mammary glands and milk ducts required for lactation, but he’d had his breasts removed.

Ms. MacDonald has written a book titled Where’s the Mother?: Stories from a Transgender Dad  that Buzzfeed says offers “insight into what it was like for MacDonald to be both male and pregnant.” Her book has also been positively reviewed by the non-credible Publisher’s Weekly, which describes it as a “refreshing and insightful narrative,” that details “circumstances that…challenge his privilege.”
Ms. MacDonald was also instrumental in forcing a change to the La Leche League’s policy on leadership requirements. When Ms. MacDonald originally applied to be a leader, La Leche responded,  “Since [a La Leche League Canada] leader is a mother who breastfed a baby, a man cannot become an LLLC leader. This enraged the homosexual and sex-rejecting communities.
But in 2014, La Leche League Canada changed its policy saying,  “It was thought that only women could breastfeed. Once it became clear it wasn’t as straightforward as that, the policy had to change.” In 2016, La Leche League International changed itspolicy. Bearded Trevor MacDonald is now a La Leche League breastfeeding coach.
Ms. MacDonald was not yet done with her science-denying pursuits. Her next effort involved using the money of hardworking Canadian taxpayers to conduct a pseudo-scientific study. The Atlantic, while referring to the scientifically female MacDonald as “he,” calls her study “a scientific approach.” Apparently The Atlantic doesn’t see the irony. Here’s The Atlantic’s description of Ms. MacDonald’s study:

He teamed up with a diverse group of lactation experts, nurses, midwives, and researchers to publish “Transmaculine individuals’ experiences with lactation, chest feeding, and gender identity,” a study that was funded by a grant from the Canadian Institute of Health Research….It’s a qualitative attempt at defining the internal and external difficulties transmasculine people face when chestfeeding.
The study recruited 22 participants who self-identified as transmasculine and who either were or had been pregnant.MacDonald and his team interviewed these participants about their experiences, and analyzed the conversations “with a goal of describing and interpreting patterns and themes that emerged,” in the study’s words. It’s an approach that’s community-based and trans-led. [emphasis added]

I can just imagine the chortles of laughter from real scientists reading this description of Ms. MacDonald’s “scientific” study. Evidently anticipating potential push-back from real scientists, another of the study’s authors defended their research study. Again from The Atlantic:

Alanna Kibbe, a registered midwife out of Toronto, Ontario…explains this approach by contending that “the wisest people in a community who can speak for it are those people living in the community and with lived experience, not the person with the most degrees or years of clinical practice.

No need for any pesky science degrees when employing a “scientific approach.” No siree, all that’s needed is a smidge of wisdom and a dollop of “lived experience.”
Kibbe does have some advice derived from her and Ms. MacDonald’s “scientific” research. She urges the use of Newspeak:

Kibbe…is urging care providers to….educate themselves about terminology that is gender neutral, as opposed to the gendered-female language that currently dominates lactation support.

The Fourth Estate, having moved to Oceania, refers to women who have given birth as “men” and breastfeeding as “chestfeeding.” Clearly, the untethering of journalism from reality means journalists are no longer using their noggins, and the ideas they promote are phantasmagorical at best. So I, while still inhabiting a shrinking corner of reality, will refer to mainstream journalists as fabulists and their untruths as fanny-fancies.
Influential 20th Century journalist Walter Lippmann, borrowing from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, said, “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.” Now 21st Century journalists tell lies and honor the devil.

Capitalism is not to blame for exorbitant rise in price of EpiPen

By
Steve Balich
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0
Posted on by Bob Livingston

Capitalism is not to blame for exorbitant rise in price of EpiPen

Or the price of much of anything else, for that matter

Epipen
The price to cash-paying customers for EpiPens is up some 600 percent to 700 percent over the past decade, with cash customers paying as much as $840 for a two-pack – though coupons are available that would bring the price down to around $650. (Hoping to dampen criticism and head off congressional hearings, Mylan announced yesterday it would begin offering a savings card to reduce the cost by as much as $300.) This is for a $2 ($4 for a two-pack) dose of medicine – a medicine available in Canada for about $100 without a prescription.
So EpiPen maker Mylan is coming under the scrutiny of the congressweasels – although that scrutiny has been tempered by the revelation that Mylan’s CEO Heather Bresch is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). Over the last several days, Senators Chuck Grassley, Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal and Representative Elijah Cummings and others have called for information, investigations and explanations from and of Mylan. Klobuchar and Blumenthal are calling for price fixing – a form of collectivism that always fails and leads to shortages and more corruption.

If that’s where they’re looking, they’re looking in the wrong place.
In the years 2012 and 2013, Mylan spent about $4 million lobbying Congress and the Food and Drug Administration. The result is a defacto monopoly on epinephrine injectors. The FDA’s rules require companies with competing injectors to exceed the specifications required by Mylan, and so far the FDA has killed or stymied almost every potential competitor that’s come along. One epinephrine injector allowed into the market is dubbed “inferior” and rarely prescribed.
In 2013 Congress passed the School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act that provides schools with financial incentives (read money from the federal treasury) to stock epinephrine injectors in case of emergency. The approved injectors are EpiPens, of course. The primary lobbying group pushing the bill was the group Food Allergy Research & Education (FARE). The primary corporate sponsor of FARE is Mylan.
EpiPens have an FDA-mandated one-year expiration meaning, whether used or not, patients are cowed into tossing their old ones in the trash and replacing them and the doctors write new prescriptions each year. The government, through Medicare and Medicaid, pay whatever Mylan decrees the price to be, sans applicable deductibles.
Government meddling in the insurance market – first simply through the regulatory process and via Medicaid and Medicare and now through Obamacare – has completely distorted the pricing structure of health procedures, physician charges and pharmaceutical prices.
In fact, government meddles in the price of everything through the obscene regulatory structure, the tax structure, via subsidies and price supports and corporate welfare, all of which drive up the prices of products and services. This is especially true of most of the foods you buy: from sugar to rice to chicken to raisins.

America is not a capitalist system and has not been for more than 100 years… nor is there one in existence much of anywhere. What there is is a marriage between big government and big business. It’s called fascism – or it was in Italy. And now we have the same thing.
It is state capitalism or monopoly capitalism and, with only very small variations, the whole world is on this system.
Bureaucratic tyranny is as bad in the U.S. as it was in fascist Italy, national socialist Germany or communist Russia. It’s just more sophisticated and the media and the public (non)education system has sold it as democracy and capitalism.

Grad Students Get Right to Unionize

By
Steve Balich
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0
Jennifer S. Altman/Bloomberg

Grad Students Get Right to Unionize. What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed Faculty

  • Published on

American higher education in an institution that dates back to the years before the founding of the country. For centuries, colleges and universities have occupied a hallowed place in America’s collective heart.
But in the last half century, higher education in the U.S. has grown from an intellectual enterprise that educated a few million students a year to a big business that enrolls more than 20 million undergraduate and graduate students. In the process, colleges and universities have become behemoths, mini-cities with nearly $500 billion in revenues and nearly a $1 trillion in assets, including cash, endowments, and of course, massive physical campuses.

Colleges and universities enroll 20 million students, have $500 billion in revenues and nearly $1 trillion in assets.

That growth spurt came in large part from huge investments by the federal government and the states through direct appropriations, student aid, and research dollars. But after a golden era of growth in public support, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, higher education had to look elsewhere for support.
By the late 1980s and then in the 1990s, tuition started to become a much bigger source of income for public universities, in particular (where 80% of American students attend), and in the first decade of the new millennium, tuition began to edge up even more as states started to get out of the business of higher education.
This new financial reality also required universities to adopt a more bare-knuckle business approach, mostly around one of their largest costs: labor. Full-time professors with tenure were replaced with part-time adjuncts who taught one or two classes and raced off campus when they were finished. Today, half of all professors at four-year colleges teach part-time as adjuncts (and the number is even higher at community colleges). Very few parents out there shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for the education of their children have any idea that most of their teachers are part-timers making a few thousand dollars a class.

Today, half of all professors at four-year colleges teach part-time as adjuncts.

It’s not just part-timers. It’s also graduate students who for paltry stipends that sometimes hover around the federal poverty level help full-time professors teach courses and assist with their research. The exploitation of labor has been accepted, somewhat reluctantly, by administrators and even some faculty members because it advanced the mission of the institution.
But now that labor is fighting back. It started with adjuncts, who have been organizing in recent years for better pay and working conditions (even such basic things as an office where they can meet with students). And this week, in a decision that will have far-reaching consequences, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that students who work as teaching and research assistance at private universities have the right to unionize (those at public colleges already had that right under their state laws).
The ruling was immediately criticized, of course, by university administrators who always seem to be on the left politically unless they are protecting their own self interests.
The current bifurcated model of the academic workforce—a mix between full-time, well-paid, tenured professors and a large group of low-paid adjuncts and graduate students—is not sustainable for the long term as tenured professors retire and institutions increasingly are measured on their student outcomes.
Recently, as part of a report on the decade ahead for higher education that I authored for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I laid out five potential scenarios for the faculty of the future at colleges and universities:

1. One Faculty for Teaching, Another for Research

A different model for unbundling the faculty role would create two distinct tracks for faculty members: one for instructors and another for researchers. The teaching-only track would be full-time and professors would be evaluated on their teaching, not their research productivity.
Standardizing and elevating the teaching-only role of faculty on campuses would eliminate the ad-hoc hiring of adjuncts that occurs now and professionalize the teaching corps by recruiting academics interested first and foremost in instruction. That in turn would provide another pathway for graduate students into academic careers and encourage graduate programs to create programs for students who want to focus on teaching at universities.

2. The Three-Member Team: Faculty, Preceptor, TA

A model is emerging that adds a third person to the teaching team—an instructor in-between the professor and the teaching assistant. These teachers, sometimes called preceptors, are experienced full-time instructors who help students make connections between what they learn in the lecture to their experience in small group sessions or in labs (in the case of science courses). The TA’s also benefit from the preceptors, who teach the graduate students how to teach undergraduates.

3. The Design-Build Approach: Faculty and an Instructional Designer

With the growth of online education in the last two decades a new player arrived on the scene: the instructional designer. Instructional designers help traditional faculty translate their face-to-face courses into virtual classes, where educational material can be presented online.
Today, the position of instructional designer is one of the hottest jobs on campuses nationwide. Membership in the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the primary national group of institutional designers, has grown by 50 percent over the last decade, to more than 2,400.
The team approach to designing and building courses typically results in a better experience for students and reduces the workload for faculty, most of whom have little formal training in learning science and may often teach exactly the same way they were taught.

4. Scholarship for All, No Matter the Role

If the faculty role becomes divided between research and teaching, professors will need to remain engaged in some form of scholarship to remain current.
This will require colleges and universities to adopt a more comprehensive definition of research that applies to a wider range of professorial roles on campuses. For instance, faculty members in the teaching function described earlier will need to be encouraged by institutions to conduct research on effective classroom practices and learning science, and that work will need to play a role in their evaluations.

5. A Flexible Faculty Role

The four scenarios laid out above make clear that the faculty role in the future will likely change drastically from what has existed on college campuses. Flexibility will be a key attribute of anyone pursuing an academic career in the future.
In many ways, varying the role of faculty members on campus will give academics more choices about the pathways to pursue throughout their careers. Today, the faculty career is largely flat and built at one institution. Even those who become full processors perform essentially the same job they did as associate professors.
With multiple channels available for faculty, professors in the future might have more choices about the direction of their own careers.
Jeffrey Selingo is author of the new book, There Is Life After College. You can follow his writing here, on Twitter @jselingo, on Facebook, and sign up for free newsletters about the future of higher education at jeffselingo.com.

Food-stamp fraud and prevalence signs of a struggling state

By
Steve Balich
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0

Illinois Policy Institute 8/26/2016
Praise for the Clintons is sparse these days.
But the 20th anniversary of the former president’s signature achievement deserves discussion.
President Bill Clinton’s welfare overhaul, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, caused welfare rolls to drop by half. But the poverty rate fell as well – especially for single mothers, minorities and children. He signed it into law Aug. 22, 1996.
The law created a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. It is through TANF that enrollees in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly known as food stamps) receive meal money.
But state data indicate too many Illinoisans have been pushed into food-stamp dependency. And stories of abuse cast a grim shadow over one of the nation’s most basic safety nets.
Trading food stamps for cash is commonplace among struggling businesses on Chicago’s south and west sides, according to a new investigation from the Chicago Tribune.
David Williams, the Cook County assistant state’s attorney, described food-stamp trafficking as “fairly rampant” in Windy City corner stores.
“We see a lot of it,” Williams told the Tribune. “It’s a major problem. It’s our tax money that’s basically funding these criminal operations.”
Store owners are frequently approached for trades of $50, $60 or $70 for $100 worth of benefits.
Wael Ghosheh made that look like spare change.
In March of last year, the man from southwest suburban Burbank was charged with using more than $900,000 from 3,000 Link cards to buy and resell energy drinks and candy. Link cards are what Illinoisans use to access their food-stamp benefits.
Fraud on this scale is a slap in the face to struggling families. And more should be done to prevent it. Massachusetts and Missouri, for example, require photo identification on the cards used for food-stamp benefits. Maine is in the process of rolling out a similar program.
And while the federal government does enforce rules on how one may use welfare funds, 25 states have taken additional steps to explicitly ban the use of welfare funds for alcohol, tobacco, gambling, lottery tickets, guns and “adult entertainment.”
Illinois is not one of those states.
But it is one of 11 states where, statewide, food stamps don’t come with a work requirement. Federal law says that for able-bodied adults under age 50 who don’t have dependents, food stamps are cut off after three months unless he or she finds work or participates in volunteering or job training.
Illinois operates under a waiver from that requirement.
There are certainly changes needed to how welfare is administered in the Land of Lincoln. But the best welfare program is a well-paying job. And Illinoisans are struggling to find decent opportunities. The food-stamp rolls reflect that.
More than 1 in 5 Illinois households rely on food stamps to make ends meet. That’s close to an all-time high.
More than 1.9 million individual Illinoisans relied on food stamps in July, a high for the year. As of May, Illinois was home to the second-highest share of individuals on food stamps in the Midwest. More Illinoisans rely on food stamps than work in manufacturing, construction, education, health care and real estate combined.
Illinois’ dreadfully slow recovery from the Great Recession has a lot to do with it.
In terms of putting people back to work, Illinois has been the second-worst state in the nation. And since the start of the recession, the state’s personal-income growth is second worst as well.
Illinois’ manufacturing sector, the backbone of the middle class, is bleeding.
Illinois manufacturing has recovered less than 4 percent of its jobs since the recession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s the worst rate in the Rust Belt.
So what happened to families who had a loved one lose a factory job? And what happened when unemployment benefits ran out?
A 2012 survey from Rutgers University sheds some light. Researchers asked people who were unemployed for more than two years how they made ends meet. Most sold some of their possessions, most borrowed money and most cut back on doctor visits.
The next most common response? Signing up for food stamps.
Reforms to grow the state’s economy ensure fewer families are forced to make that choice. And reforming the way the state administers those benefits would go a long way toward ensuring the program’s integrity.

TAGS: corruption, food stamps, jobs, SNAP, unemployment, welfare

Illinois has highest black unemployment rate in U.S.

By
Steve Balich
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0
August 24, 2016 Illinois Policy Institute
The Land of Lincoln’s job-killing policies are hurting minority communities increasingly hard, while black unemployment in pro-growth states remains significantly lower.
Illinois has the highest black unemployment rate in the country at 15 percent, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, or EPI. This has resulted from policymakers’ yearslong neglect of Illinois’ economy. Illinois’ political leadership has ignored opportunities to encourage economic growth while enacting taxes and regulations that have stunted job creation. These anti-job policy decisions have helped create a situation where Illinois’ most economically vulnerable residents are the least well-off of any state considered by EPI’s study, which focuses on the half of U.S. states with larger black populations.
By contrast, pro-growth states such as Indiana, Michigan and Texas record significantly lower black unemployment rates, with Indiana at 9.6 percent, Michigan at 9.3 percent and Texas at 6.1 percent – the lowest rate of any state in the study. The EPI analysis estimates unemployment rates by ethnic groups and comes ahead of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ full release of such annual data.
No state in the Midwest, of which states have available data, comes particularly close to Illinois’ 15 percent black unemployment rate. Even Michigan, home to the highest black unemployment rate in the country as recently as 2013, has significantly improved its standing as its rate declined to 9.3 percent. Ohio comes in at 10.3 percent and Missouri at 8.2 percent, according to the estimates.
illinois black employmentAccording to the EPI study, the situation has worsened in Illinois, with black unemployment rising over the last two years to 15 percent in the second quarter of 2016 from 12.6 percent in the third quarter of 2014. This contrasts with Texas, where the black unemployment rate has improved over the same time period. The Lone Star State’s black unemployment rate has fallen over the last two years even in the face of an economic slowdown caused by the falling price of oil. Illinois’ black unemployment rate is now more than double Texas’.
illinois black employment
In particular, Illinois’ black male unemployment rate has been especially high over recent years. Declining employment in Illinois’ industrial sectors most likely has harmed job opportunities for black men. According to the BLS’ 2015 annual average data, Illinois’ black male unemployment rate was 15.1 percent, the highest in the Midwest and more than double Indiana’s rate.
illinois black employment
Ominously, the EPI estimates that Illinois’ black unemployment rate has gone up since the 2015 annual averages. The current black male unemployment rate would be approximately 19.7 percent assuming it rose proportionally with total black unemployment. And this staggering unemployment level comes seven years after the Great Recession ended.
Black Americans would especially benefit from the pro-growth economic policies and lower tax burden all of Illinois needs. The strategy of taxing, spending and tightly regulating business has failed Illinois, and has hurt black communities in particular. Policy reformswill encourage investment and hiring in Illinois’ industrial sectors:

The status quo has failed Illinois’ industrial communities, minority communities and large swaths of people who simply want decent job opportunities. This has resulted in workers and their families leaving the state at record rates to find better opportunities elsewhere, leaving behind those with fewer resources stuck jobless in the Land of Lincoln.

TAGS: jobs, unemployment

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