30K American jobs scratched.

Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines “has secured its place as the world’s fastest-growing outsourcing hub.” Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the “big four” US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.

source: 3 Years After Taxpayer Bailout, Bank of America Ships Jobs Overseas | Mother Jones.

An important part of this whole deal is that the Philippines doesn’t have all these crazy “regulations” as in there are no data privacy laws for call centers:

US banks already are operating call centers in the Philippines, “despite the fact that they haven’t actually passed this rudimentary legislation,” says Shane Larson, legislative director for the Communication Workers of America (CWA), which represents 150,000 American call center workers. The Indian government is ahead of the Philippines in passing data privacy laws, notes the union, but those laws specifically exempt the call center industry. And that could lead to problems: In a 2005 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 85 percent of the Indian outsourcing companies that responded said they had experienced information security breaches in the previous year.

So for those of you who worked for Bank of America: kick rocks. For those of you who bank with Bank Of America: make sure you regularly check that no one in the Philippines is trying to open a credit card in your name.

I didn’t really think of this before. Last time I went through a job search, the call center was overseas. So basically I was giving over a bunch of information to someone who has no penalty for accessing my private info.

I’ve never been in handcuffs in my life. There were a few times in high school I was less than well behaved. Luckily I didn’t go to a school where they felt the best way to discipline me was to enroll me into Intro to Incarceration:

…we can’t even stop handcuffing kids to stuff if they get out of hand:

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, will no longer handcuff students to poles or other objects and will train staff at its alternative school on better methods of discipline.

source: Progress! – First Draft.

And I do mean luckily. I fear being handcuffed and thrown in a cruiser. For anything. I simply don’t want to be arrested. It just isn’t something I expect to happen. I bet these kids expect that they can be handcuffed for anything. They are literally training kids to be o.k. with incarcerated. As Atrios points out, Jackson, MS is 80% black.

I loved riding my bike and running and walking places as a kid. My feet and my bike were my tickets to personal freedom between dusk and dawn during the summer time. So this is kind of awful to me:

Principal Stuart Byrne says the ban is safety-driven. “Obviously bike riding is healthy,” Byrne says. “Never on earth is our thought that bike riding isn’t good—but traffic here has increased tremendously in 18 years.” In 1995, in an attempt to calm the hectic entrance and exit hours, Byrne hired an off-duty policeman to direct traffic. “It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon,” he says of one memorable day during the officer’s first week at work. “The buses were just starting to roll—and I can still hear the screeching tires. Five minutes later he came inside, whiter than that sheet of paper. He said he’d almost gotten it both ways.” Byrne cancelled the experiment; eventually the school got a crosswalk, but there’s no sidewalk, nor any traffic light other than a flashing School Zone warning. Even kids who live directly across the street from school are required to get there every day by either bus or car.

“I don’t think Stu Byrne’s initial [concern] was the safety of our kids,” says Janette Marino. “If it were, they would have put in a traffic light when the school was originally built—and kids wouldn’t have to be on a bus for 40 minutes.” Janette points to studies (performed by the National Resources Defense Council, Coalition for Clean Air, and University of California at Berkeley) that show diesel-exhaust levels inside some school buses are more than eight times higher than the average content of the air outside—and, as children’s lungs are more susceptible to toxins, the report surmises that ailments such as cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma can ensue. Still, parents who then conclude that the safest course is to drive a child to school should be aware that, while 85 children under age 16 were killed while cycling in the United States in 2009 (the year the Marinos caused a ruckus), more than 15 times as many—1,314—kids under age 15 died in motor-vehicle crashes.

source: Why Johnny Can’t Ride.

Kids should be able to ride bikes and walk to school. Especially if they live across the street from school.

So, what you have is an intersection where traffic has gotten bad and the principal and community won’t insist on safety standards during school hours to allow children to use a safer and healthier mode of transportation (walking and or biking). See something wrong here? We keep asking kids to bend towards negative developments in society (people needing to drive so fast past a school while probably yapping on a cell phone it is thought not to be safe at the school) or establishing rules and designing traffic to preserve healthy (physically and culturally) lifestyles for kids attending a school.

They could request that authorities set up a police patrol speed trap near the school once a month, boost ticket rates with school zones.

They could maybe try and have the buses and cars sue a different entrance than cyclists and walkers.

But they shouldn’t tell kids and their families not to bike or walk to school. Car culture can not be the end all be all of our travel value system.

Lanny Davis reps for Booker’s needless and counterproductive defense of Bain Capital. Again, Booker is not a bad dude or awful guy, just had a really bad moment in presidential campaign “surrogacy”.

Asked about Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant that the company acquired in 1993 when Romney was Bain’s CEO, Romney last week told a conservative radio host that it wasn’t his problem: “Their problem, of course, is that the steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital. I was no longer there. So that’s hardly something which is on my watch,” he said.

source: Obama: Romney’s Bain Capital tenure is fair game, president’s job is not maximizing profits – The Washington Post.

So if a job was created after Romney left Bain, he gets no credit, by his own admission.

See Zerlina Maxwell: In defense of S.E. Cupp.

Through Andrew Sullivan’s blog, some contrarion nonsense from Will Wilkinson…

08:44 AM

A new study by economists Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney suggests that income inequality is a major cause of teenage pregnancy.

[…]

Will Wilkinson draws a different lesson:

Perhaps we’ll be less eager to combat teen motherhood now that we understand that it doesn’t much harm the economic prospects of the young women most likely to go in for it. My own reaction to this news is to wonder whether it isn’t cruel to try to discourage relatively poor teen girls from seeking the comforts of motherhood, if motherhood won’t hurt their prospects. If we set aside as ill-founded our paternalistic economic motivations to reduce rates of teen motherhood, only the impulse to discourage the proliferation of those people and/or thatculture seems to remain. I’m not comfortable with that.

A child by definition “harms” economic prospects: they cost money, can’t contribute to the bottom line, and require time previously used to make money. It’s your current economic status that usually determines if it harms your prospects profoundly and permanently or not. You know what’s being worse for your economic prospects than being poor? Being really poor. You know what’s worse for your economic prospects than being really poor? Being really poor with a child. The worst thing about Wilkinson’s article is the last two sentences where he ascribes a mentality of racist or xenophobic paternalism to those who would like to stem or reduce teen pregnancies:

If we set aside as ill-founded our paternalistic economic motivations to reduce rates of teen motherhood, only the impulse to discourage the proliferation of those people and/or that culture seems to remain. I’m not comfortable with that.

Wilkinson also ignores the fact that impoverished single mothers utilize prenatal care less due to lack of access or affordable options, early childhood poor nutrition is also linked to problems later in life and that teenage pregnancy quite often affects three generations of the family: the new teenage mother, the child and the new grandparents.

10:24 AM

Bryce Covert explains why a “quarter of all ‘poverty spells’—falling into poverty for two months or more at a time—begin with the birth of a child”

What Wilkinson wrote isn’t interesting. It’s literally making the: they won’t ever be sh*t because they aren’t sh*t argument so why give a sh*t argument and trying to present it as some kind of egalitarian new way of thinking of impoverished single motherhood. He’s like some sort of Medeival guidance counselor pushing young maids to wed so that they don’t end up a lonely old spinster at 20.

Neither former employees or colleagues support Mitt Romney’s claim to job creation expertise from Bain:

On the other hand, as Randy Johnson astutely observed in our profile, Romney has brought this problem on himself:

“None of what happened in Marion in the 1990s would be very interesting,” Johnson notes, “if Mitt Romney had not built his entire political career on the claim that he’s a job creator.”

We also interviewed Marc Wolpow, a former Romney colleague at Bain, who defended the buyout business as promoting American competitiveness. The main goal at buyout firms, however, is never maximizing employment, Wolpow told us. It’s maximizing returns for investors. “The facts,” Wolpow said, “tend to get lost in the political spin.”

source: Mitt Romney’s Private Equity Nightmare – Businessweek.

From Atrios (Eschaton: The Math):

Can some of the people who rule us sit down and do a few calculations. Look at typical student loan debt at graduation. Look at median first job salaries for college graduates. Typical 10 year earnings profiles of those graduates. Then ask yourselves, how exactly are they supposed to buy homes and save for retirement?

College is one of those things where the college tuition has far outpaced inflation or the actual cost of running the institution. Decades ago you could work the summer and pay for school. How many summers of work for a person in their late teens early twenties to pay for a year of tuition these days? exactly.

Romney:

Those experiences in totality have given me an understanding of how America works and how the economy works. Twenty five years in business, including business with other nations, competing with companies across the world, has given me an understanding of what it is that makes America a good place to grow and add jobs, and why jobs leave America – why businesses decide to locate here, and why they decide to locate somewhere else. What outsourcing causes – what it’s caused by, rather. I understand, for instance, how to read a balance sheet. I happen to believe that having been in the private sector for twenty five years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created – that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand.

Source: The Page by Mark Halperin | The Romney Interview – Transcript

Obama:

Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world —(laughter) — know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough — you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now, and the challenge we’ve faced for over a decade, is that harder work has not led to higher incomes, and bigger profits at the top haven’t led to better jobs.

Source: ‘Those of us who’ve spent time in the real world …’ – POLITICO.com.

I understand, Obama’s a politician. He needs to get a majority of votes (electoral, really) cast to win re-election. So he needs a lot of people to like him. But there’s a bunch of people who believe Barack Obama to be some sort of anathema that emanates from him being a black Muslim, Kenyan, Chicago Gangster politician, effete elite, radical Christian, black panther, socialist, communist, democrat. And that’s called Obama’s Appalachia problem, not America’s prejudice problem.

So people continuously insured should be able to get new insurance. Therefore, those that have developed a condition while they were insured and then change jobs, lose jobs, go to a new place, apply for new insurance would be guaranteed issue in that new entity so that you don’t have to have people worried about a preexisting condition preventing them from becoming insured.

source: The Page by Mark Halperin | The Complete Romney Interview Transcript.

The whole issue with preexisting conditions is it is an issue for un- or underemployed folks who are uninsured for at least a designated period of time who have an illness and seek insurance. Not for the employed. This answer quite frankly makes no sense. When you go to a new job, you aren’t “applying for new insurance” you are joining coverage under an existing group.

Sensible governance, he [Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)] declared, has taken a “back seat to the far right’s idolatry on taxes. And now this has gone so far — this idolatry, they have taken to such an extreme end, they make Eduardo Saverin into their patron saint. In the name of low taxes for the wealthy, they have lionized an inherently unpatriotic person.”

source: Chuck Schumer Unloads On Grover Norquist Over Nazi Comparison | TPMDC.

Schumer has it right. A guy says “f* the USA” and because it is probably because he hates taxes, Republican support his renunciation of citizenship. This guy is literally anti-American.

Read: Harold Ford: Cory Booker was right – POLITICO.com.

This goes by the law: whatever Harold Ford says, do the opposite.

Also Axelrod:

“I love Cory Booker. He’s a great mayor,” Axelrod said. “If my house was on fire, I’d hope he was my next door neighbor.”

But, Axelrod said, Romney’s record at Bain was entirely legitimate as a campaign topic.

“There were specific instances here that speak to an economic theory that isn’t the right theory for the country,” Axelrod said.

Pressed about why the Obama campaign continues to host fundraiser and accept Wall Street and private equity cash, Axelrod pivoted to Romney.

“There’s only one guy who is running for president of the United States and offering this as his credential to be president,” Axelrod said. “Not every investor operates that way.”

From the ACLU::

In support of an important case brought by the ACLU of Maryland defending the right to record, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division forcefully and unequivocally endorsed our view in an unusual (but welcome!) 11-page letter to the Baltimore Police Department.

When it comes to wiretapping private citizens law enforcement agencies consistently say: if you don’t have anything to hide you shouldn’t worry, which ignores the point that it’s unconstitutional.

Amazing.

See Brad DeLong’s post named “Nick Hanauer: The Inequality Speech That TED Won’t Show You”:

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Since 1980 the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.

If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs. And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.

Preach brotha, preach!