An Illinois District Court judge has ruled that IBM owes billions to elderly employees:
‘The prohibition against age discrimination existed long before the appearance of cash balance plans,’ Murphy wrote. ‘All that has changed is IBM’s clever, but ineffectual, response to law that it finds too restrictive for its business model.’
Looks like one Israeli conscientious objector won’t be going to jail.
A disgrace to the state of Rhode Island:
Gov. Don Carcieri’s new homeland security law would create new felony charges, require annual safety audits of every public school and close some public records, including those that show whether businesses comply with state Fire Safety Code requirements.
The bill, which Carcieri introduced last week, also resurrects World War I-era laws that make it illegal to ‘speak, utter, or print” statements in support of anarchy; speak in favor of overthrowing the government; or to display ‘any flag or emblem other than the flag of the United States” as symbolic of the U.S. government.
The top story in the Friday YDN is the debate on the state level about whether exempting Yale from paying taxes on for-profit property might, perhaps, be one more issue on which the Whig party got it wrong:
State Rep. Toni Walker, a Democrat from New Haven who has been involved in drafting legislation concerning the exemption, said the city, which may increase property tax rates for the third straight year, needs Yale to pay its “fair share.”
“We have no more money, and we have to look at other ways to raise revenue,” Walker said. “How do you tell the residents in the community that you have raise property taxes, but we’re not going to tax a large corporation like Yale?”
Mike Morand of Yale’s Office of New Haven and State is apparently less than thrilled:
“This legislation will impact no properties and add no revenues to New Haven,” Morand said. “As for Yale, our plan is to continue the real partnerships we’ve built to make New Haven stronger, rather than be distracted by the loud few who refuse to give up the Yale-bashing history the vast majority of this community long left behind.”
I’d be the last to make light of the Ben Carson Book Club. But an array of charitable programs can’t take the place of a sustained, negotiated, institutional partnership, and a few million dollars a year to buy a couple New Haven streets can’t replace the dozen million dollar difference between the money coming out of CT taxpayers’ pockets in lieu of Yale’s taxes and the amount in taxes the property of this company town company is worth.
Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal wants John Kerry to sue Rupert Murdoch’s British Sun for libel for printing Matt Drudge’s Kerry intern flap. The journalistic merits of Drudge and Murdoch aside, this is yet another example of the tremendous potential for abuse under Britain’s perverse libel laws, which render those who print objectionable speech guilty until proven innocent. If Blumenthal were a true progressive, and not simply a partisan Clintonista, he would recognize that censorship – even when directed at the powerful and those who carry water for them – always comes back to hurt the most vulnerable.
More Munoz: In the latest New Haven Advocate, Ana explores the symbolism of the Larry Kramer Initiative’s new exhibit on homosexual history at Yale – in Sterling Memorial Library:
the most moving pieces hanging triumphantly in Sterling today are testimonies of narrowly avoided defeat. Over and over again, former Yalies, many of whom went on to important careers as authors, artists, scholars, speak of college as a suicidal time, a time of self-discovery with fatal consequences. Larry Kramer’s piece describes the time he swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Stuart Kellog, who went on to become the first editor-in-chief of the national gay publication The Advocate , tried to kill himself as an undergrad. The power of The Pink and the Blue lies in this stark juxtaposition between the library’s lofty posture, so quintessentially Yale, and the way that pressure of Yale’s ambition has so often forced curious, honest souls into a descent.
The four years undergraduates spend inside Yale’s lofty walls are really about admitting who you are, declaring identities you’ve always felt but never put boundaries and words to. If Sterling Memorial Library is a place students return to countless times on the quest for self-disclosure, then Katz and his colleagues were right to house their exhibit here. It is perhaps the most important history of individual scholarship at Yale, one where students boldly uncovered their true selves and almost suffered fatal consequences.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expresses his support for the June 30 deadline for Iraqi sovereignty put forth by the US, and echoes Paul Bremer’s assertion that that’ll be too soon for direct elections.
Meanwhile, the Times reports some deserved skepticism in Iraq about the relationship between the American deadline and the American political calender.
Alderman Ben Healey endorses Alyssa Rosenberg and Shaneane Ragin’s campaign for Ward 22 Co-Chairs:
The best campaigns are about more than the people on the ballot. In the case of Ward 22, Alyssa Rosenberg, a sophomore in Silliman College, and Shaneane Ragin, a Dixwell resident, represent the possibility for real cooperation between Yale students and Dixwell. An effort like Shaneane and Alyssa’s campaign for Democratic Party Ward Co-chairwomen has never happened in New Haven. Not once have a Yale student and a member of the Dixwell community chosen to become running mates, to work together as co-equal partners in a joint and concerted effort to make the neighborhood stronger. It is only fitting that these two young women should be two of New Haven’s youngest office seekers. They are the future of this city. Their campaign is a partnership between students and New Haven residents that has the power to make lasting change.
Over at the New York Times (quasi-)blog, Matt Bai is trying to take a bold stance against conventional wisdom by arguing that Howard Dean’s campaign did not, in fact, leave any lasting legacy for American politics:
Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change. His campaign, as he never tired of reminding us, was about “taking the country back,” which seemed another way of saying it was basically about winning.
It’s a nice try, but in this case the conventional wisdom (if that’s what it is – I thought the conventional wisdom, at least over at the Times, was that Dean was an unstable fanatic leading hordes of dateless college kids) is right. Bai’s basic argument, it seems, is that Dean didn’t run on a signature issue and therefore was only creative tactically but not ideologically. I think he’s wrong on two counts. First, as Dean himself has argued, the seeming unanimity among the Democratic candidates now obscures the fact that a year ago few were arguing that blasting Bush’s broken promises in Iraq, in public schools, and in the workplace was the Democrats’ route to success. Healthcare in particular was an issue that, while urgently important to millions of Americans for decades, Howard Dean put back on the map for a party largely convinced that because a zealous corporate lobby was able to tank a half-hearted moderate healthcare reform ten years ago it was relatively hopeless to try to cover most Americans.
Second, Bai is wrong to argue that Howard Dean’s tactics amounted to nothing more than really wanting to win. The significance of what Dean embarked on is demonstrated, as I argued at the time, by the incredulity of the New York Times magazine in trying to report what was driving his campaign. “Ordinary Americans convinced that there could be a connection between a broken political system and the challenges they’re confronting in their own lives? Must be like of some kind of Alchoholics Anonymous meeting. Why are they talking so much about themselves? Don’t they know only people who run for office are important?” An organizing model, like universal healthcare, is not a new idea. But what they have in common is that the Democratic party of the past couple decades has in large part left them to rust. And Howard Dean, for all his mistakes – like relying on Northeastern college students to canvass in Iowa rather than cultivating a stronger core of organizers from the state – helped bring them back to life.
There’s been a lot of talk recently among Democrats, particularly those committed to John Kerry, about how Howard Dean “brought people into the party.” That’s true, but it’s only half of the story, and in that sense is wishful thinking by those who want the Democratic party to stay the course of the past decade. Howard Dean, despite a conservative record of his own, chose that he could get farthest by being a vessel for a popular movement that existed before him and will continue after him – and in so doing, he took an important step towards bring the Democratic party back to the people.
The Wall Street Journal is closer to the truth than the New York Times on this one: “the most consequential loser since Barry Goldwater.”
Last night the New Haven Board of Aldermen, by unanimous consent, brought New Haven one step closer to a substantive institutional partnership with the University. Yale’s administration, meanwhile, continues to defend a tax “super-exemption” (yeah, that’s actually what it’s called) established by which political party? That’s right. The Whigs.
The AFL-CIO delivers the Kerry endorsement foreshadowed last week:
At a rally attended by hundreds of union workers outside its Washington headquarters, AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said workers who have lost jobs under the Bush administration ‘show exactly why it is so important that we come together now to put a friend of working families in the White House next November.’
Now, Sweeney said, ‘the time has come to unite behind one man, one leader, one candidate.’ He called Kerry ‘a man who will not sign his name to a single trade agreement that does not include worker protections and environmental protections. . . . He will be our champion in the White House, and he will bring jobs back to America.’
Greeted by workers chanting his name, Kerry said, ‘Today we stand united in a common cause . . . not just to defeat George Bush but to put our country back on track on the road of prosperity, the road of fairness, the road of jobs.’ He ridiculed President Bush for backing away from his economic advisers’ forecast of an increase of 2.6 million jobs this year…
‘It just doesn’t take a lot of fuzzy math to count to zero,’ Kerry said. ‘We are not asking George Bush to count the jobs. We’re asking George Bush to create the jobs and to fight for working people.’
Kerry added, ‘As president, I will do that.’ “
This endorsement comes as Kerry and Edwards both compete for the title of Fair-trader, a gratifying spectacle that would have been unheard of one of two election seasons ago:
Kerry, who voted for NAFTA in the Senate, has sought to blunt Edwards’s argument that the two candidates differ sharply on trade, a distinction that the freshman senator has been trying to sharpen as he stumps for votes in states hard-hit by job losses.
“I think it’s clear that Senator Kerry and I have very different records on trade,” Edwards told reporters yesterday.
…”We have the same policy on trade — exactly the same policy,” Kerry told reporters before speaking at a rally at a United Auto Workers hall in Dayton yesterday.
Yesterday, several dozen undergraduates and grad students met up to discuss the ways in which Yale’s graduate student pay inequity disvalues their work and our education, to deliver a letter to Graduate School Dean Peter Salovey, and to begin planning a larger mobilization for March.
Back home in Philly, U Penn’s superior-acronym-bearing graduate student union, GET-UP, has announced plans for a two-day strike next week to coincide with parade welcoming Penn’s new President to demand that Penn agree to count the ballots from the union election held by its grad students a year ago:
Rich Klimmer, an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers based in Philadelphia, said that, by contrast, when he was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, graduate students did not do any teaching until they had finished all their coursework. He said they also were given three weeks of training on how to prepare and give lectures and how to build and grade exams.
“Now, under the corporate model of running a university, they take anyone and put them in the classes,” Klimmer said.
Money and benefits are at the root of the bid to unionize. Graduate students, who are paid on average $15,000 a year, argue that they don’t earn a living wage for this region. Many graduate students are older, returning students who have families. Deirdre Martinez, 36, a graduate student in Penn’s education school, has two children ages 5 and 7 and a husband who teaches at Temple University. She said universities such as Penn need to treat adult learners with the same respect they would expect elsewhere.
Penn, Brown, and Columbia, at Yale President Levin’s urging, have all had the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded, pending a potentially decade-long appeal process as far as the Supreme Court. This is the legal limbo into which Levin has expressed his desire to shunt GESO as well. That’s why GESO continues to demand a fair process whose results can be recognized by both sides.
Democracy, Levin often likes to remark in disparaging the more democratic Card-Count Neutrality process, means voting. If democracy means voting, then surely it demands that the votes be counted, and the results followed. That’ll take the continued struggle of graduate students across this country.
Josh Eidelson 