Dangerous Intersection

This is why Elizabeth Warren is one of my heroes

Elizabeth Warren is doing exactly what she was hired to do–speaking up for ordinary Americans:

Banks and brokers have sold deceptive mortgages for more than a decade. Financial wizards made billions by packaging and repackaging those loans into securities. And federal regulators played the role of lookout at a bank robbery, holding back anyone who tried to stop the massive looting from middle-class families. When they weren’t selling deceptive mortgages, Wall Street invented new credit card tricks and clever overdraft fees.

This is more than I can say for Barack Obama. He should be taking full advantage of his bully pulpit and cranking on Wall Street and the financial “services” industry, but he is only giving lip service. This makes me wonder why he isn’t using that silver tongue week after week to shame Congress into enacting reform. And he shouldn’t wait for the banks and Congress to give him support for reform.

Screw the banks, and enact reform. Don’t wait for the banks to get in line. We need credit card agreements that people can read and understand, for starters. We are more than a year into Obama’s Presidency and nothing significant is happening to clean up our corrupt financial system.

This young President needs to go read his campaign speeches to remind himself of what he needs to do. And if Congress is so corrupt that none of his campaign promises can be accomplished, then shame Congress, week after week.

Changing our approach in our classrooms

In her NYT Op-Ed, Pychologist Susan Engel advises what we are doing wrong in the classroom. She argues that we need to do more than change the way we measure progress–we need to overhaul the entire way we teach:

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on. . . .

What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Hypocrisy on parade

Perhaps you’ve heard about the American hikers being held in an Iranian prison? A couple of Belgian bicyclists who were detained at the same prison have some updates on their situation:

“We’re deeply concerned for their well-being,” Van den Bosch and Falleur wrote in a news release. “The psychological stresses of detention were very great, especially during interrogation and solitary confinement.”

As of early December, when Van den Bosch and Falleur were released, the American hikers were being held in solitary confinement, a harrowing experience the Belgian men describe in detail.

“We were in cells with no outside contact and a ceiling light on day and night,” they wrote. “No communication was possible with other prisoners or with our families. Everything was designed to make us feel very lonely.”

Van den Bosch and Falleur added, “From our own experience, we can only imagine that the psychological pressure put on the hikers to confess to crimes they are innocent of is extremely intense. Their feeling of loneliness must be extreme.”

Yes, no doubt the psychological pressures one must face in those sorts of situations must be intense. Not as intense as the pressures innocent Muslims face in America’s torture prisons and secret black-ops sites, but extreme in any case!

Greenwashing - Exhibit A: Elephant Poo Poo Paper

I’m getting really tired of greenwashing, so much so that I’ve creating a new category called “greenwashing” dedicated to these sorts of incidents:

A false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness used to conceal or obscure damaging activities.

Today I am featuring Exhibit A, “Elephant Poo Poo Paper.” It’s being featured here as Exhibit A not because it is the worst offender ever, but because it is my first of a series of incidents of greenwashing I’ll be pointing out over the months. It’s worth our while to point out greenwashing because these sorts of products help maintain the illusion that we don’t need to change our lives dramatically to accommodate Earth’s depleted and contaminated resources. All we need to do is to buy cute products and claim that we thereby give a damn.

Now, back to today’s featured product: “Elephant Poo Poo Paper,” which was recently purchased at the St. Louis Zoo. Just think: we can now make good use of elephant poop (as though it can’t just be left alone to enrich the soil). We can help save the planet by manufacturing heavily-dyed paper and shipping it thousands of miles away from the “elephant conservation parks” where the elephant poo is purportedly gathered and then turned into paper by mixing it with bananas and pineapples.

Buy “Elephant Poo Poo Paper” and feel like you are doing your part to save the world. Better yet, give it as a gift so you can loudly broadcast to others that you are doing your part to save the world.

If it’s actually so good to the earth to make paper out of poop, there is a lot of cow poop (among other kinds of poop) just waiting for those who want to be “green” paper manufacturers.

Expensive CEO’s of charities

How can one really justify a salary of $1 Million to run a charity? Consider the case of Brian A. Gallagher, who is paid $1,037,140 to run The United Way. Or consider the American Red Cross, which pays its top person, Gail J. McGovern, $495,187 per year. These are stats from 2009 provided by Forbes.

Here’s how you fix this problem: Pass a law to make all charities disclose the salaries of its top ten highest earning officers and employees on all solicitations for donations.