An Old Idea for a New Age

 All over America, our citizens are having a difficult time finding work. But young people are particularly hard hit. In the past when we have had serious economic downturns, the government provided emergency employment so that people could get by until the economy recovered. We should have been doing that since this crisis started. But since unemployment is so high, we can still do things to help people deal with this crisis. Let’s employee young people to make a America better place. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

James Pilant

A Civilian Conservation Corps for the Modern Age | John Bridgeland

More than 80 years ago, FDR saw power in marrying two threatened resources — millions of unemployed young men during the Great Depression with the public lands beset by deforestation and soil erosion. His CCC put more than three million young men into productive service over a decade with impressive results: Three billion trees planted, 97,999 miles of fire roads built, 800 parks constructed and proper drainage for more than 84 million acres of agricultural land (almost the equivalent acreage of our entire National Park System). But FDR knew that the transformation ran deeper — not only in helping support young men and their families, but \”the moral and spiritual value of such work.\”

…

Given the needs today, with high youth unemployment, 6.7 million young people disconnected from school and work, two million veterans returning from war, and public lands and waterways in desperate need of our attention, our country has the opportunity to marry vulnerable resources once again. The 21st Century Conservation Service Corps points the way.

via A Civilian Conservation Corps for the Modern Age | John Bridgeland.

For the Majority of Americans Poverty is One Pink Slip Away.

Everyday the danger lurks. Could something happen to my job? What will I do? How will I pay my bills? Homeless?

Last year a third of Americans fell into poverty at least some of the time.

If that doesn’t scare you or disgust you, I don’t understand. That kind of insecurity is terrible to live with, and when it actually happens, when someone falls out of the middle class and lands on a street grate, that life is changed forever.

James Pilant

Why the Republicans’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor — Is Backfiring | Robert Reich

Poverty is now a condition that almost anyone can fall into. In the first two years of this recovery, according to new report from Census Bureau, about one in three Americans dropped into poverty for at least two to six months.

Three decades of flattening wages and declining economic security have taken a broader toll. Nearly 55 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 have experienced at least a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line). Half of all American children have at some point during their childhoods relied on food stamps.

Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared a \”war on poverty,\” most of the nation\’s chronically poor had little or no connection to the labor force, while most working-class Americans had full-time jobs.

This distinction has broken down as well. Now a significant percentage of the poor are working but not earning enough to get themselves and their families out of poverty. And a growing portion of the middle class finds themselves in the same place — often in part-time or temporary positions, or in contract work.

Economic insecurity is endemic. Working-class whites who used to be cushioned against the vagaries of the market are now fully exposed to them. …

via Why the Republicans’ Old Divide-and-Conquer Strategy — Setting Working Class Against the Poor — Is Backfiring | Robert Reich.

Aitizaz Hasan, Hero

“My son made his mother cry, but saved hundreds of mothers from crying for their children,”

Just Read.

James Pilant

Pakistani boy who died trying to stop suicide bomber is hailed as hero | World news | theguardian.com

A 15-year-old who died while tried to defend his school in Pakistan\’s troubled north-west from a suicide bomber has been hailed as a hero for saving the lives of many of his classmates. Aitizaz Hasan tackled the bomber as he stood outside as a punishment for being late to school in Hangu, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, on Monday.His two companions fled the scene after spotting the bomb being carried by the man, who was trying to gain access to the school, but Aitizaz grabbed the bomber.Unable to stop him from detonating his bomb, Aitizaz later died of his wounds in hospital.Hangu has a large community of Shias, an Islamic sect which many militant groups regard as heretics who should convert to the majority Sunni faith or be killed.Aitizaz\’s actions are thought to have saved the lives of many of the 2,000 students who were believed to be in the building at the time.\”My son made his mother cry, but saved hundreds of mothers from crying for their children,\” his father, Mujahid Ali, told the Express Tribune newspaper.\”There are a handful of people in the world who are martyrs; I am now one of those proud fathers whose son is among them.\”

via Pakistani boy who died trying to stop suicide bomber is hailed as hero | World news | theguardian.com.

The Ethics Sage Discusses Sport Ethics

My friend, Steven Mintz, the Ethics Sage, has an opinion piece on sport ethics. I have here a brief excerpt. As always, please go to his site and read the whole thing. An excerpt does not do it justice, and you would be wise to bookmark his site and follow his posts.

James Pilant

Sport Ethics – Ethics Sage

The abiding values of sport include fairness, integrity, responsibility, and respect. Fairness requires that each player and each team should have an equal chance to play up to their abilities. The taking of steroids by well-known baseball players such as Ryan Braun violates the fairness doctrine because it gave him a competitive advantage over those who played by the rules, which ban certain substances.

Integrity is related to fairness and the other values because it addresses the whole of the person. Does each individual playing the sport truly believe in and practice the core values of sport? That is the essence of integrity or principled behavior in sport. In football, faking an injury at the end of a game to stop the clock lacks integrity and the offending team may lose time off the clock. In basketball some would say ‘flopping’ to draw a foul lacks integrity.

Respect deals with how athletes and coaches relate to athletes, teammates, opponents, coaches, and officials. Rutgers University Mike Rice was fired on April 3, 2013, after the coach was caught on video hitting, kicking and taunting players with anti-gay slurs at practice.

Responsibility entails accepting the consequences of one’s actions on the field including one’s emotions. On a Thanksgiving game last year, Pittsburgh Steelers coach

via Sport Ethics – Ethics Sage.

Should Professional Women Ever Get Married?

While this study has been criticized, I believe it. Women face hurdles in the academic world that men do not, or more correctly and broadly, women face hurdles that men don’t. You would think that in the supposedly more liberal world of colleges and universities there would be more income equality.

It is important that the issues is actively being discussed. At least, we are not pretending that things are better or by far, worse, not even seeing a problem. Most successful sexism relies on a practiced acceptance of the status quo. Acknowledging a problem, recognizing it, is the first step in action.

The first question of our analysis: Do we want professional women to get married? The current situation mitigates against this but some would see this as an action of the free market, and suggest that delaying or avoiding marriage is a natural phenomenon. Since, every last detail of the problem is a human creation, I find free market naturalism, treating humanity like a slightly more sophisticated herd of wildebeests, little more than ridiculous. What humans have created, humans can change. I think that the question is flawed. A better question: Do we want professional women to have children?

Perhaps marriage itself is a social institution that needs re-examination. I think that highly educated women are likely to make better than average parents. Certainly this is the case with the academic women I know. If we value the child rearing quality of women, then we as a society should not penalize women for having children.

We can do this through subsidized and regulated, professional day care. We can do this through paid leave. We can do this by giving up stigmatizing single mothers and divorced women. The practice of slut shaming has outlived its purpose, keeping women in their place and regulating their sexuality. We can do better.

Women in this generation will not escape the social pressures like diminished professional lives that go with our current customs but a new world is possible where we achieve parity. I won’t see it. Maybe the current generation won’t see it, and maybe the one after that. But we can lay the foundation here and now. We are not helpless. We have to recognize our power and use it.

Hope and action are not contradictory. The time for change is now.

James Pilant

Female economists penalized for getting married, married men rewarded.

According to a study that was presented earlier this month at the American Economic Association, women (who make up about a third of Ph.D students in economics) who got married in the first five years after they received their Ph.D.s had a 23 percent salary growth penalty—in other words, their salaries grew much more slowly— compared with their unmarried female counterparts. Men who got married in the half decade after they got their doctorates? They received a 25 percent salary growth bump—their salaries grew by a larger margin—compared to other men. Wendy Stock, a co-author of the study and a professor of economics at Montana State University, said in an email that among female economists, the penalty for having children was not statistically significant. “In addition, our estimates didn’t indicate that the impact of having a child was any different for males than for females,” Stock wrote. (If Ph.D. candidates have children while still in graduate school, they take longer to complete their studies, regardless of gender).

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via Female economists penalized for getting married, married men rewarded..

Obese Coffins?

This is a must read article. It is wonderfully written and tells a story of great social significance. The story in a nutshell is that there is a lucrative market in the United States for “plus” size coffins. Often these coffins won’t fit in hearses, require purchase of a double plot and won’t fit through funeral home doors.

I get a vision of a funeral where the coffin is delivered by some kind of truck, hopefully black.

The implications for this society are scary.

Please read the whole article.

James Pilant

In death, as in life, one size doesn’t fit all | Al Jazeera America

Eating into an early grave

If anyone can do a snap survey of the fluctuating fortunes of overweight Americans, it’s Keith Davis. From the casket-manufacturing business he inherited from his father, he has a pretty good sense of how widespread the obesity problem is and how young those who die of obesity-related complications can be.

“We have a generation of people now, especially the younger ones in their 30s, who are going to die before their parents because of obesity,” he says. “As I travel around and deliver these caskets, the average age of these people is 40, 45 years old. And many of them are younger than that.

“I’ve delivered to people who are 25 years old, and it’s not because they died on a football field. They were just so big, their hearts gave out or their kidneys gave out,” he says. “We’re eating ourselves into an early grave, one shovelful at a time.”

Davis’ father, Forrest Davis, began building caskets for overweight people in the late 1970s and ’80s. As Keith Davis explains it, funeral directors would call their distributors and ask for bigger caskets. Because there were no established dimensions for the larger sizes, a carpenter or “someone who was handy” would make a box. Forrest Davis quit his job as a welder in a casket factory and began building his own extra-large caskets in an old converted hog barn on the family farm.

Now Keith Davis and his family sell several hundred oversize caskets a year, ranging from 33 to 52 inches wide. The 52-inch caskets are for people who tip the scales at 700 to 800 pounds, he says.

“We’re getting larger. One of the things we found is, people are not only getting wider, they’re getting thicker and deeper,” he says. “So the caskets have to accommodate the belly, and I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Those caskets are for people “who can’t walk or can’t survive outside a bed or a chair,” he adds.

One 37-inch casket he’s preparing is destined for a funeral home in Mississippi, Davis notes, for a person who is not only “wide but thick. That’s about the size of your desk. That’s a large, large person, probably weighs around 500 pounds.”

via In death, as in life, one size doesn’t fit all | Al Jazeera America.

Pope Scaring Rich People?

The article goes into more explanation about how troubled the Home Depot founder is, but I am little concerned. I was raised in Christianity and well remember the teaching in regard to the rich. The bible does not hold them in high esteem, not should it.

James Pilant

Home Depot Founder: Pope Francis’ Criticism Of Capitalism Will Scare Away Rich People | ThinkProgress

The idea that possessing significant wealth inherently makes it harder to behave morally is a bedrock part of Christian ethical thought. In a well-known passage from the New Testament, a rich man asks Christ what he must do to fully follow God’s law. When Christ responds “sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor,” the man walks away dejected, prompting Christ to observe that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

via Home Depot Founder: Pope Francis’ Criticism Of Capitalism Will Scare Away Rich People | ThinkProgress.

Tar Sands Mercury

This needs looking into. It appears to be similar in many ways to U.S. concerns over fracking. Of course, the Canadian government has promised an energy bonanza if the sands are developed, a claim becoming more dubious over time. I don’t believe that government will take any action that would endanger the development. So, there will have to be a reliance on private research to reveal what’s happening.

What are the business ethics here? It seems to me that we can have energy and clean air and water. If we can’t we need to have a discussion about what kind of priorities this society has. What we have now is the kind of closed political discussion associated with vast industry profits and a contempt for democracy. If we can’t breath and the water is contaminated, it may well happen before any effective action can take place.

James Pilant

Researchers find 7,300-sq-mile ring of mercury around tar sands in Canada | Al Jazeera America

Scientists have found a more than 7,300-square-mile ring of land and water contaminated by mercury surrounding the tar sands in Alberta, where energy companies are producing oil and shipping it throughout Canada and the U.S.

Government scientists are preparing to publish a report that found levels of mercury are up to 16 times higher around the tar-sand operations — principally due to the excavation and transportation of bitumen in the sands by oil and gas companies, according to Postmedia-owned Canadian newspapers like The Vancouver Sun.

Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk recently presented the findings at a toxicology conference in Nashville, Tenn.

The revelations add to growing concerns over the environmental impact of mining the tar sands. Many environmentalists charge that extracting oil from the sands will lead to an increase in carbon emissions, the destruction of the land, water contamination and health problems for Canadians. The debate over the tar sands crossed over into the United States when energy company TransCanada proposed building the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil to the southeastern U.S. for refining and distribution.

via Researchers find 7,300-sq-mile ring of mercury around tar sands in Canada | Al Jazeera America.

Occupy Wall Street Still Innovative

Occupy Madison provides housing for the homeless.

James Pilant

Homeless Couple Gets A Home On Christmas Eve, Thanks To Innovative ‘Occupy’ Group | ThinkProgress

For many couples, the thought of living together in a 96-square-foot house sounds awful. But for Chris Derrick and Betty Ybarra, it’s a Christmas miracle.

That’s because Derrick and Ybarra have spent the better part of a year braving Madison, Wisconsin’s often-harsh climate without a roof over their head.

They’ll spend this Christmas in their own home, thanks to more than 50 volunteers with Occupy Madison, a local Wisconsin version of the original Occupy Wall Street group in New York. The group, including Derrick and Ybarra, spent the past year on an innovative and audacious plan to fight inequality in the state’s capital: build tiny homes for the homeless.

via Homeless Couple Gets A Home On Christmas Eve, Thanks To Innovative ‘Occupy’ Group | ThinkProgress.