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In what is most likely a sign of things to come in next year’s election, three Republican presidential candidates, albeit fringe candidates at the moment, ripped public schools during a homeschoolers convention in Des Moines Wednesday.
The Tea Party darlings threw red meat to a receptive crowd, which ate it up.
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota noted that she homeschooled her five children and was not allowed to home school 23 foster children, thanks to the evil government.
Herman Cain, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, said, “That’s all we want is for government to get out of the way so we can educate ourselves and our children the old-fashioned way.”
And then there’s Ron Paul.
Texas Congressman Ron Paul told the crowd government wants “absolute control” of the “indoctrination” of children.
“The public school system now is a propaganda machine,” Paul said, prompting applause from the crowd of hundreds of home schooling families. “They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism — and they condition them to believe in so much which is totally un-American.”
I don’t know what public schools Paul has been around, but the ones I have been around for the past half-century as a student, newspaper reporter, and teacher have generally been reflective of the community. Most teachers go to church, shop at Wal-Mart and Target, and spend almost no time thinking about how they can increase the level of indoctrination of the apparently empty vessels that fill their classrooms.
The teacher in the room next door to mine even listens to Rush Limbaugh every day during his lunch

On his Thursday Fox Business show, John Stossel took aim at ten government policies that he claimed have unintended consequences and are causing more harm than good. Included in his top-ten list, which ranged from health care reform to parity for women’s sports, was the minimum wage. Stossel, a TV personality who probably brings in more in a week than a minimum wage earner does in an entire year, opined that our nation’s lowest-paid workers get paid too darn much — and that’s why unemployment is so darn high.
As Stossel tells it, he doesn’t oppose the minimum wage because he’s in the pocket of Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut and the other national chains that profit by keeping wages low. Instead, he cares deeply about workers who fill low-wage jobs, and wants what’s best for them. Home health aides, restaurant workers, and janitors may think they’d be better off if they got paid more. But Stossel explains that many of them will be out of work if the minimum wage goes up — and that therefore they’re better off working for lower pay and getting experience. His sympathetic guest, Russell Roberts, a professor at George Mason University delivers the Stossel message quite clearly: “What can be more cruel than to raise your wage artificially, and then have no wage?”
But even the most casual examination of Stossel’s critique reveals that it’s long on rhetoric but short on facts.
Myth Number 1: Minimum wage earners are mostly teens.
Minimum wage opponents like to claim that low-wage workers earning near the minimum wage are mostly teenagers working for pocket change. They therefore characterize low-wage jobs as valuable learning opportunities for kids — rather than a job that needs to deliver a fair paycheck. Says Stossel, “Low wage jobs used to be a way for kids and the unskilled to get into the labor force; to prove themselves.” He continues, “The construction industry used to be a place teens could get a foot in the door, learn the discipline of regular work. Minimum wage has left many teens without a job.”
Not counting the fact that construction is a relatively high-paying industry with few minimum wage jobs, there are two major problems with this argument. First of all, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, three quarters of minimum wage earners are 20 or older. In fact, many of the largest growth occupations in the low-wage economy, like home health aides, are generally worked by older adults, many of them in their forties and fifties. So when we’re talking about minimum wage jobs we are overwhelmingly talking about adults. Period.
And about those teens. While Stossel’s kids may not need the money, many of the small share of low-wage workers who are teens come from low and middle income families who rely on their wages to make ends meet and cover growing tuition bills.
In addition, the rationale perpetuated by Stossel that teens should be happy with any job — no matter how low paying — is deeply troubling. Stossel presents minimum wage jobs as almost a social service, repeating over and over again how minimum wage jobs provide critical work experience for youth. In this context, any pay for these jobs seems generous. But while they are gaining experience, minimum wage earners are carrying out critical jobs that keep businesses operating and profiting. When they serve food, watch a child or ring up a customer, they are doing valuable work that keeps businesses depend on to thrive.
Myth Number 2: Minimum wage increases kill jobs.
Stossel claims that low-paid workers are actually hurt by the minimum wage because businesses cut jobs when the minimum wage goes up. “Minimum wage left many teens without a job,” said Stossel. “No wonder teen unemployment is 26%.”
It’s true that teen unemployment is disturbingly high, and we need to work hard to bring that number down so that teens who are trying to help contribute to their families or pay for their education can get back into the labor market. But Stossel’s claim that minimum wage has created the crisis in teen unemployment is just not true.
Lest we forget, we are currently experiencing the highest unemployment since the Great Depression because of the wreckage caused by the bursting of the housing bubble and the financial crisis. Teens, who have less experience than their older coworkers, are generally the first fired and last to be rehired when jobs are scarce, and are therefore suffering from even greater joblesssness.
Furthermore, more than a decade and a half of academic research has shown that the minimum wage raises the incomes of the lowest paid workers without reducing employment. The effects of the minimum wage have been studied in the real world for years, and the most rigorous science on the subject shows that increases in the minimum wage don’t cut jobs.
The latest contribution to this body of work is a comprehensive new study recently published in the prestigious Review of Economics and Statistics. A team of economists from the University of Massachusetts, University of California and University of North Carolina compared every pair of neighboring counties in the United States that straddle a state border and had a different minimum wage at any time between 1990 and 2006. Their analysis of employment in over 500 counties across the nation found that minimum wage increases did not lead to job loss.
And another study, to be published in April in the journal Industrial Relations, specifically examines teen employment and finds that even during times of high unemployment, minimum wage increases have not lead to job loss.
While Stossel claims that the minimum wage cuts jobs, the real experience on the ground shows otherwise. That’s because while employers give their lowest-paid employees a little bump up in pay when the minimum wage increases, they also benefit from lower turnover and higher morale and productivity. Better-paid workers are better employees.
While Stossel’s recycled attacks on the minimum wage don’t hold water, expect to see these arguments for gutting the paychecks of the lowest paid workers gathering steam. Business interests are poised to take advantage of high unemployment and decreased worker bargaining power to try to shred decades-old worker protections.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Recently John Stossel of FOX Business Channel has aired a number of segments disparaging sustainable agriculture. His issues have included the use of herbicides and pesticides, grainfed vs. grassfed beef, genetically modified food and food safety. Is Stossel going out of his way to be outrageously provocative? To what end? And for whose benefit? Certainly we are not the only ones to condemn these reports as being inaccurate, unbalanced and biased, as the many comments to the reports attest.
Stossel would no doubt accuse me (as program director of Animal Welfare Approved) of being unrealistic and only supporting small scale farms. However, the reality is that to keep the planet healthy and fed we will need to employ a wide range of solutions. Sadly, the last 40 years of “big ag’s” version of the solution has shown chronic failure in the form of antibiotic resistance, tainted water and some of the largest food recalls in history. Too bad Stossel doesn’t recognize that we have to stop using the planet — a finite resource — as “big ag’s” test tube.
Let’s take a look at Stossel’s grassfed versus grainfed beef segment. Determining which of these methods of production is “best” is a complicated matter involving animal welfare, human health and environmental outcomes. It is unfortunate that as with the other topics in his series, Stossel appears to have taken a rather close-minded and biased approach to a very complex subject.
In making the claim about grassfed meat that “there’s no evidence it’s better for the environment or better for you,” Stossel relies heavily on the evidence of Dr. Jude Capper, Assistant Professor of Dairy Sciences in the Department of Animal Sciences at Washington State University. I have recently spent time with Dr. Capper and found her understanding of the greenhouse gas issue to be somewhat in harmony with my own. However, when it comes to solutions, our approaches are as different as night and day.
Dr. Capper states that a “whole-system approach” proves that intensive livestock systems — in which meat or milk production is maximized per animal, per acre — are less environmentally damaging than what she calls “inefficient” pasture or grass-based systems. Yet it is Dr. Capper who is not looking at the “whole system” — or indeed the bigger picture we all face. In reality, the vast majority of scientists who are working on climate related issues contend that it is intensive agriculture — with its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and other damaging environmental practices — that is the real climate culprit. And in the face of the reality of climate change and ever-decreasing oil reserves, “business as usual” agriculture is just no longer an option.
One of the biggest problems is that any report which states that grassfed meat is less environmentally friendly than grainfed meat has ignored the environmental costs of all the inputs needed for the system. The true cost of feedlot beef has to consider the full environmental footprint caused by producing cattle feed — all the way back to the destruction of vast tracts of rainforest in order to grow soy and corn fed to cattle confined to massive feedlots. This is before we start adding in the environmental pollution from feedlots and the greenhouse gas emissions from the stockpiled manure. On the side of grassfed beef, the positive influence of carbon sequestration that is specific to grazing grassfed animals must be considered.
Stossel sadly relied on only one source for his information on grassfed. He didn’t take the time to understand both sides of the argument and, like a student with a poorly researched school paper, published his report without review or evidence. This lack of rigor appears to be the only way industrial agriculture and its mouthpieces can defend themselves.
Moving on to Stossel’s report about herbicides and pesticides, here, too, he is off the mark. Atrazine is regularly found in water across the U.S. at levels above the designated “safe” maximum residue level. This pesticide has been banned in Europe for more than five years due to its toxicity and presence in water sources. I therefore wonder why Stossel feels we should subject America’s children to this potentially dangerous chemical with no known antidote.
In 2002, two studies raised new concerns about the herbicide: one connecting extremely low levels of atrazine with sexual abnormalities in frogs, and another pointing to increased prostate cancer among workers at atrazine factories. Why do we have to keep using this when Syngenta (the manufacturer of atrazine) has an alternate product? Perhaps it’s because atrazine is highly profitable so why worry that it makes people sick by polluting our water? As long as it has good shareholder return! Nice work, John, good to see you have the interests of the population at heart.
And finally, in Stossel’s segment on genetically modified food, he takes a swipe at one of his guest’s reference to the 2006 recall of spinach contaminated with E.coli. While debating the fine point of whether the spinach was from a field in organic conversion, Stossel ignored the 800 pound gorilla in the room: Where did the deadly E.coli O157:H7 pathogens come from in the first place? Certainly not organic spinach. Studies report that confinement feeding of grain to cattle and low dose antibiotics are the main culprits in the evolution of the E.coli O157:H7 at the core of the explosion in food poisoning outbreaks.
As disturbing as Stossel’s lack of balanced reporting is, there is a real positive here. Clearly, someone has put huge sums of money and effort into trying to distort the truth. This tells those of us working with alternatives to the industrial agricultural model that we are making a difference and that our message is getting through. In the parlance of bomber pilots, you know you are near the target when the flak really starts to fly. Stossel’s biased attacks should be a rallying cry to all of us to redouble our efforts… there’s no stopping us now! We are getting the message out there and we will continue our rallying cry against “business as usual” agriculture.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com