Browsing PBH By Articles

Welcome To The Age Of Climate Denial

The Article: Welcome to the Age of Denial by Adam Frank in The New York Times.

The Text: IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.

In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.

The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.

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Why We’re Still Not Intervening In Syria

The Article: Why We’re Still Not Intervening in Syria by Michael Hirsch in The Atlantic.

The Text: Bashar al-Assad is, finally, having a very good week.

The latest allegations of chemical-weapons use against the Syrian dictator don’t matter nearly as much as other dramatic developments–in particular, the United States’ willingness to stand aside while Assad’s autocratic brethren in the Egyptian junta cold-bloodedly killed some one thousand protesters, supported by the Saudis and Gulf states.

And this week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, finally said plainly what Obama administration officials have been thinking privately since June, the last time Washington said its “red line” had been crossed and pledged military aid to the Syrian rebels–then did nothing. In a letter to Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., Dempsey said flatly that U.S. aid to the rebels know would just end up arming radical, possibly al-Qaida-linked groups. And Obama wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

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Why We Need To Start Treating College Funding Like We Do High School

The Article: Start funding college like high school by David Sirota in Salon.

The Text: Whether or not President Obama’s speech today is in direct response to Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s eye-opening must-read on the college loan crisis, it is great news that the White House is evidently now taking the crisis more seriously. The credit bubble in college loans has ballooned into a systemic threat to the nation’s economy. Additionally, as Taibbi documents, economic and political trends are now converging to force an entire generation into a truly no-win situation: either don’t get a post-secondary education and severely harm your ability to get a job in an already weak economy, or get a post-secondary education and condemn yourself to a lifetime paying off debt that you may never be able to pay off because the economy is so weak and your job prospects are still not guaranteed.

The economic trend that is fueling this perfect storm is about job credentials. Peruse employment data and you’ll see that the New York Times was right when it declared that “the college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job.” Though the Times notes that the weak economy means the job outlook for college grads “is rather bleak,” it is even more bleak if you don’t have a post-secondary degree.

So, in terms of job-market competitiveness, some form of higher education is now increasingly as necessary as high school education. Yet, that’s the thing: in its financing models, America isn’t treating it as such. Just consider the critical distinction between how high school and college education are funded.

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The Minimum Wage Scandal

The Article: How low can you get: the minimum wage scam by Heidi Moore in The Guardian.

The Text: You’d think the exceptionally low minimum-wage – $7.25 an hour – would be the shame of a country like the United States that prides itself on its economic leadership. Half of minimum-wage jobs are held by adults over 25 years old, and asking adults to live on $7.25, or $14,500 a year, doesn’t leave them with enough to rent an apartment, commute to work, raise a child and participate in society in any meaningful way.

Many US states have higher minimum-wage requirements than the government, with Washington State leading the pack at $9.19 an hour. That’s a start, but many large, international companies will only pay the minimum the federal government requires. As a result, the federal minimum wage keeps an entire class of people trapped in economic servitude, focusing their attention on survival rather than growth, barring their ability to save enough or pay for education that would allow them to rise to the middle class.

Income inequality is as bad as it has ever been – and the reason is simple.

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Why America Can’t Live Without War

The Article: Why America cannot live without wars by Chidanand Rajghatta in The India Times.

The Text: WASHINGTON: On a day marking the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I-Have-A-Dream” civil rights speech, the United States is poised to unleash another nightmare some 10,000km away in the Middle-East. Washington’s war machine is geared up for limited strikes against Syria because Damascus ostensibly crossed a red line by using chemical weapons against its own population, never mind that many regimes worldwide inflict atrocities against their own people by other means.

Why a President who came to office on the strength of his anti-war credentials – especially on the phony war foisted on Iraq – is running with the war hounds, is something of a mystery. But the rest of the Washington establishment is champing at the bit to unleash missiles on the Syrian regime, promising a short punitive strike, in keeping with the well-worn belief that America cannot live without a war.

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