Japan Might Be What Equality in Education Looks Like

"...[I]n Japan only about 9 percent of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. The [world] average is 14 percent, and in the United States, it’s 17 percent."

 Japan Might Be What Equality in Education Looks Like

The country’s government makes sure areas with low income levels and property values get good teachers too.

Alana Semuels 
The Atlantic 
Aug 2, 2017

KAWAMATA, Japan—In many countries, the United States included, students’ economic backgrounds often determine the quality of the education they receive. Richer students tend to go to schools funded by high property taxes, with top-notch facilities and staff that help them succeed. In districts where poorer students live, students often get shoddy facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and fewer guidance counselors. 

Not in Japan...“In Japan, you may have poor areas, but you don’t have poor schools”...
 

A Blistering Dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives Substituted Opinion for Fact

Supreme Court Justices, from left, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justices of the Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan applaud State of the Union Address,12 Feb 2013 (Rex Features via AP Images)

A Blistering Dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives Substituted Opinion for Fact
Moyers and Company
April 2, 2014

Central to the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions in the John Roberts era is that the government’s only legitimate interest in this area is preventing direct, quid pro quo corruption — a donor demanding that a specific law be passed, or killed, in exchange for cash — or the appearance of direct corruption.

In the McCutcheon decision announced on Wednesday, the court struck down a limit on how much cash an individual could give to all federal candidates during an election cycle. The five conservative justices allowed that the rich showering friendly candidates with unlimited amounts of money might drown out the voices of the majority and distort our fragile democracy, but not blatantly enough to justify the spending limit.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that “government regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford.”

The conservative majority passed on an opportunity to strike down a limit on how much a donor can give to an individual candidate — perhaps because in Citizens United, they’d accepted the proposition that unlimited donations to “independent” third party groups didn’t lend the appearance of corruption — but Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, wrote that “limiting the amount of money a person may give to a candidate does impose a direct restraint on his political communication,” and moved to strike that provision down as well.

The court’s four-member minority issued a blistering dissent, written by Justice Stephen Breyer. He charged that the majority’s “conclusion rests upon its own, not a record-based, view of the facts.”

Its legal analysis is faulty: It misconstrues the nature of the competing constitutional interests at stake. It understates the importance of protecting the political integrity of our governmental institutions. It creates a loophole that will allow a single individual to contribute millions of dollars to a political party or to a candidate’s campaign.

Taken together with Citizens United, Breyer writes that McCutcheon “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.”

He goes on to dissect the claims on which the court’s ruling rest. He first takes issue with the idea that the government only has an interest in preventing a direct exchange of cash for votes.

In the plurality’s view, a federal statute could not prevent an individual from writing a million dollar check to a political party (by donating to its various committees), because the rationale for any limit would “dangerously broade[n] the circumscribed definition of quid pro quo corruption articulated in our prior cases.”

This critically important definition of “corruption” is inconsistent with the Court’s prior case … and it misunderstands the constitutional importance of the interests at stake. In fact, constitutional interests—indeed, First Amendment interests—lie on both sides of the legal equation.

In reality, as the history of campaign finance reform shows and as our earlier cases on the subject have recognized, the anticorruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality acknowledges. It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions. And it is an interest rooted in the Constitution and in the First Amendment itself.

Consider at least one reason why the First Amendment protects political speech. Speech does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, political communication seeks to secure government action. A politically oriented “marketplace of ideas” seeks to form a public opinion that can and will influence elected representatives….

The First Amendment advances not only the individual’s right to engage in political speech, but also the public’s interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.

What has this to do with corruption? It has everything to do with corruption. Corruption breaks the constitution­ally necessary “chain of communication” between the people and their representatives. It derails the essential speech-to-government-action tie. Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard. Insofar as corruption cuts the link between political thought and political action, a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point. That is one reason why the Court has stressed the constitutional importance of Congress’ concern that a few large donations not drown out the voices of the many….

The “appearance of corruption” can make matters worse. It can lead the public to believe that its efforts to communicate with its representatives or to help sway public opinion have little purpose. And a cynical public can lose interest in political participation altogether.

Breyer then wonders how the conservatives could square McCutcheon’s narrow definition of “corruption” with its conclusion, in the 2003 case McConnell v. FEC, that money — and the access it purchases — has a pernicious influence on the political process.

The Court in McConnell upheld these new contribution restrictions under the First Amendment for the very reason the plurality today discounts or ignores. Namely, the Court found they thwarted a significant risk of corruption—understood not as quid pro quo bribery, but as privileged access to and pernicious influence upon elected representatives.

In reaching its conclusion in McConnell, the Court relied upon a vast record compiled in the District Court. That record consisted of over 100,000 pages of material and included testimony from more than 200 witnesses. What it showed, in detail, was the web of relationships and understandings among parties, candidates, and large donors that underlies privileged access and influence. The District Judges in McConnell made clear that the record did “not contain any evidence of bribery or vote buying in exchange for donations of nonfederal money.”

Indeed, no one had identified a “single discrete instance of quid pro quo corruption” due to soft money. But what the record did demonstrate was that enormous soft money contributions, ranging between $1 million and $5 million among the largest donors, enabled wealthy contributors to gain disproportionate “access to federal lawmakers” and the ability to “influenc[e] legislation.”

“We specifically rejected efforts to define ‘corruption’ in ways similar to those the plurality today accepts,” writes Breyer.

He then takes on the conservatives’ second rationale: that the problem the aggregate limit was supposed to address — huge donors funneling money indirectly to a candidate in order to get around the limit on contributions to a single campaign — isn’t an issue today.

The plurality is wrong…. In the absence of limits on aggregate political contributions, donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates, producing precisely the kind of “corruption” or “appearance of corruption” that previously led the Court to hold aggregate limits constitutional. Those opportunities for circumvention will also produce the type of corruption that concerns the plurality today. The methods for using today’s opinion to evade the law’s individual contribution limits are complex, but they are well known, or will become well known, to party fundraisers.

He offers three concrete examples of how a wealthy donor might be able to get millions of dollars to a single candidate without running afoul of the law under McCutcheon.

But perhaps the dissent’s most withering criticism of the ruling is that, as in Citizens United, it was decided according to the majority’s beliefs, rather than the factual record.

In the past, when evaluating the constitutionality of campaign finance restrictions, we have typically relied upon an evidentiary record amassed below to determine whether the law served a compelling governmental objec­tive. And, typically, that record contained testimony from Members of Congress (or state legislators) explaining why Congress (or the legislature) acted as it did….

If we are to overturn an act of Congress here, we should do so on the basis of a similar record….

Determining whether anticorruption objectives justify a particular set of contribution limits requires answering empirically based questions, and applying significant discretion and judgment. To what ex­tent will unrestricted giving lead to corruption or its appearance? What forms will any such corruption take? To what extent will a lack of regulation undermine public confidence in the democratic system? To what extent can regulation restore it?

… For another thing, a comparison of the plurality’s opinion with this dissent reveals important differences of opinion on fact-related matters. We disagree, for example, on the possibilities for circumvention of the base limits in the absence of aggregate limits. We disagree about how effectively the plurality’s “alternatives” could prevent evasion. An evidentiary proceeding would permit the parties to explore these matters, and it would permit the courts to reach a more accurate judgment. The plurality rationalizes its haste to forgo an evidentiary record by noting that “the parties have treated the question as a purely legal one.” But without a doubt, the legal question—whether the aggregate limits are closely drawn to further a compelling governmental interest—turns on factual questions about whether corruption, in the absence of such limits, is a realistic threat to our democracy….

The justification for aggregate contribution restrictions is strongly rooted in the need to assure political integrity and ultimately in the First Amendment itself. The threat to that integrity posed by the risk of special access and influence remains real. Part III, supra. Even taking the plurality on its own terms and considering solely the threat of quid pro quo corruption (i.e., money-for-votes exchanges), the aggregate limits are a necessary tool to stop circumvention. And there is no basis for finding a lack of “fit” between the threat and the means used to combat it, namely the aggregate limits.

The plurality reaches the opposite conclusion. The result, as I said at the outset, is a decision that substitutes judges’ understandings of how the political process works for the understanding of Congress; that fails to recognize the difference between influence resting upon public opinion and influence bought by money alone; that overturns key precedent; that creates huge loopholes in the law; and that undermines, perhaps devastates, what remains of campaign finance reform.

Class Is Seen Dividing Harvard Business School

"...[S]he was told by her classmates that she needed to spend more money to fully participate, and that “the difference between a good experience and a great experience is only $20,000.”

America has become far less egalitarian as the wealth of the better-off has skyrocketed in the past few decades. At Harvard, the ultra-wealthy are segregating themselves. In other parts of the country, the merely well-off are segregating themselves.

Top 1% take biggest income slice on record
Matt Krantz
USA TODAY
September 10, 2013

The gulf between the richest 1% of the USA and the rest of the country got to its widest level in history last year.

The top 1% of earners in the U.S. pulled in 19.3% of total household income in 2012, which is their biggest slice of total income in more than 100 years, according to a an analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics at Oxford University.

The richest Americans haven't claimed this large of a slice of total wealth since 1927, when the group claimed 18.7%. The analysis is based on data from Internal Revenue Service data...


Class Is Seen Dividing Harvard Business School
By JODI KANTOR
The New York Times
September 9, 2013

As soon as new students arrive, they are expected to write checks of $300 or $400 to their “sections,” the groups with whom they take first-year classes, if they want to participate in social events. In recent years, second-year students have organized a midwinter ski trip that costs over $1,000, while others, including members of “Section X,” a secret society of ultrawealthy students, spend far more on weekend party trips to places like Iceland and Moscow. Tickets to the winter ball, called Holidazzle, have cost $200 or more in recent years.

When Christina Wallace, now the director of the Startup Institute, attended Harvard Business School on a scholarship, she was told by her classmates that she needed to spend more money to fully participate, and that “the difference between a good experience and a great experience is only $20,000.”

“Class was the bigger divide than gender when I was at H.B.S.,” said Ms. Wallace, who graduated in 2010.

In reaction to an article published in The New York Times on Sunday about Harvard Business School’s attempt to improve its atmosphere for women, many students, alumni and readers echoed her comments.

“A pervasive problem,” a member of the class of 2013 wrote on nytimes.com. Another member of the class said that she had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars a year to keep up socially, and that she never invited classmates to her parents’ home nearby because she did not feel it was lavish enough.

Many alumni from decades ago, including Suzy Welch, a former editor of The Harvard Business Review, said they were startled by the culture of spending that was depicted in the article, including the news that one student had lived in a penthouse apartment at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston. When Ms. Welch graduated in 1988, money mattered, she said in post on Twitter, “but conspicuous consumption events were rare.”

A reader named Ken H said that the tone at the school in the 1970s was downright egalitarian, and that anyone who “flashed money around” would have earned jeers. “Maybe what has changed isn’t so much H.B.S., but America,” he said.

The Harvard Business School student body is at least somewhat economically diverse, with 65 percent of students on financial aid, receiving an average grant of $60,000 over the two-year program, according to a spokesman. (Tuition costs more than $50,000 per year.)

The class of 2013 included former members of the military, children of struggling single mothers and a former butcher, among many others. But just as the school has made efforts in recent years to draw students from a wide array of economic backgrounds, the global elite has been accumulating far more wealth and the American income divide has been growing.

The result is a school that mixes students of relatively modest means with extremely wealthy ones, including in recent years the children of Leon Black, a private equity investor, and Gerald D. Hines, the founder of one of the world’s largest real estate firms, among many others. In interviews, some students mentioned the Instagram feed of Michael Hess, a member of the class of 2013, who has posted photographs of Mick Jagger close-up in concert, courtside seats at a Knicks game and stops on his trips around the world.

Many Harvard business students and readers were especially troubled by Section X, and the idea that even within the extremely elite confines of one of the nation’s premier business schools, the ultrawealthy are segregating themselves.

“There is this underbelly at H.B.S. of extremely wealthy individuals — spoiler alert, I am not one of them,” said Brooke Boyarsky, who delivered a triumphant speech at graduation about social change at the school...

Are the rich getting most of the welfare money after Hurricane Katrina?

Beau Rivage Resort and Casino, Biloxi Mississippi

Many are still struggling on the Gulf Coast. But casino and real estate investors are living large -- thanks to Republican officials.

By Tim Shorrock

As residents of Mississippi's Gulf Coast gather today to commemorate the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, they will recall a cataclysmic storm that spared no one, rich or poor, from its destruction. Virtually every structure along the 90-mile stretch of coastline was either wrecked or swept away after Katrina's 140-mile-an-hour winds and 40-foot storm surge came ashore like a steamroller from hell.

Yet, while the national media has focused its attention on New Orleans, it has given relatively little coverage to the hurricane's impact elsewhere, even though the destruction to coastal Mississippi, which bore the full brunt of the storm, was as bad as, and in some places worse than, the calamity that struck New Orleans when the levees there broke.

Two years later, some of these areas are still distressed. One reason for the lack of attention paid to the Gulf Coast may be the massive investments made in the region by casino, hotel and real estate interests.

That has created the appearance of a recovery that business promoters say has brought, and will continue to bring, enormous growth to the area.

But many locals say that the casino-led development has done little to alleviate post-disaster conditions for most residents, including the 37 percent of the population -- approximately a half million people -- who earn below what federal guidelines deem low to moderate income.

Moreover, maneuvering in Washington by the state's Republican leaders has diverted aid money away from some of the people who need it the most.

...Reilly Morse, a civil rights lawyer from Biloxi who works for the Mississippi Center for Justice, [says] "Since the aid money began flowing, there's really been two recoveries here: one that generally favored homeowners with resources, and another one that basically priced the poor out of the housing market."

The $23.5 billion in federal funding that Mississippi's [Republican] governor and its two Republican senators managed to obtain was unprecedented in scope for a state recovering from a natural disaster. But the distribution of the $4 billion the state obtained specifically to help residents rebuild their housing, thanks to Barbour, has been badly skewed toward wealthy homeowners.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/29/gulf_coast/index_np.html

Have you checked your bank account lately?

From Speak Out California:

"Not surprisingly, if you checked your bank account balance
recently, the wage gap is widening in California with the rich
getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

"The highly respected California Budget Project released a new
report this week, "A Generation of Widening Inequality: The
State of Working California, 1979 to 2006." Its findings are not
surprising. The wealthiest continue to gain capital and the
poorest continue to lose purchasing power with wages that barely
keep pace with inflation. Interestingly, the gap between
low-wage and high-wage workers has widened more in California
than in the country as a whole. California's high wage workers
are doing better than most, but our low-wage workers are doing
worse than their US counterparts. And what is happening to the
middle class? It's simply disappearing. Of course, now is the
time to go out and buy that yacht and airplane, but then again,
only the wealthy can afford them---and don't have to pay into
the public treasury to boot! The good news for them is that
they're getting rich enough to be able to afford one of each,
while working Californians continue to struggle, with the bottom
pay range having dropped 7.2% and 43% of new jobs paying less
than $11 an hour.

"Sadly, but not surprisingly, the economic recovery of the past
decade has not provided the historic broad increase in the
standard of living for workers but instead has created
"skyrocketing corporate profits". So much for the right-wing's
much ballyhooed "trickle down" economics."

From the weekly update on the goings-on in Sacramento for the week ending August 25, 2007.

Speak Out California is at www.speakoutca.org/weblog/