Who is Charles Miller, really?

Charles Miller is the business executive at the helm of George W. Bush’s commission on higher education. The U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education is currently exploring a “No Child Left Behind” type higher education policy, which would impose standardized tests on colleges and universities.

On her website, teacher and education activist, Susan Ohanian has two “backgrounders” on Miller.

Outrages: “Panel explores standard tests for colleges

Outrages: “Charles Miller invests [sic] himself

A recent Fort Worth Weekly article titled “School for Profit” had this to say about Miller:

By 1994, Dallas entrepreneur Randy Best had made a fortune in investment banking. That year he decided to branch out. He rounded up investors and, with $3.5 million in hand, founded a for-profit company called Voyager Expanded Learning. One of those investors was Charles Miller, a millionaire friend of George Bush. The Texas governor tapped Miller to lead the statewide task force on school reform. Miller was also a friend of Margaret Spellings, another education advisor who would become secretary of education when Bush became president.

David Emerson on Vancouver-Kingsway voters: They’re not relevant

David Emerson, the new Conservative cabinet member, who was elected a couple of weeks ago in my riding (Vancouver-Kingsway) as a Liberal told the Vancouver Sun that he doesn’t expect the anger directed at him for his defection to the Conservatives will linger.

Emerson, the multi-millionaire timber executive, who by-passed the local nomination route as one of Paul Martin’s “star candidates” in the previous election was pretty clear about his distain for the little people in Vancouver-Kingsway (of whom 82% voted against the Conservatives). Emerson told the Sun:

“There are some people who are angry at me and cannot shake it. That may have an impact. But I’m not aware of people who are in the positions that are relevant to what I have to deal with and feel that way. In fact, I’ve had an awful lot of very positive support with the people involved on the issues that I’m working on.”

There you have it, the problem with capitalist liberal-democracy in a nutshell, the voters are not “relevant” to what the politicians have to deal with.

Of course BC corporate interests love Emerson, as do the right-wing Liberals running the province and Emerson clearly sees those folks as relevant.

Evolution is not a “viewpoint”

Inside Higher Ed reports that “Wisconsin State Rep. Terese Berceau became concerned when she started seeing polls that showed more Americans wanted “alternative viewpoints to evolution,” primarily intelligent design, she said, taught in public schools. “Evolution is not a viewpoint,” Bereceau added. And she wants the Wisconsin Legislature to agree.”

Berceau announced a bill this week that seeks to “stem the growing tide of intelligent design and other specious science.”

The three-sentence bill says that anything taught as science in science classes should be “testable,” describe “only natural processes,” and be consistent with science as described by the National Academy of Sciences, which has said intelligent design is not science.

Inside Higher Ed reports “University of Wisconsin at Madison faculty members, five of whom Berceau consulted, applauded the bill as strong support for teachers who have been caught in the middle of the controversy. “I think it makes Wisconsin look good the same way [embracing alternative theories to evolution] made Kansas look silly,” said Alan Attie, a biochemistry professor at Wisconsin and one of the faculty members Berceau consulted.”

The immorality of the mininum wage

In her Znet Commentary on the what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would tell the US Congress about valuing workers, Holly Sklar makes a compelling argument that the current federal minimum wage in the US is immoral. (See below.) While fighting for an increase in the minimum wage is certainly a worthy short term effort, let’s not forget that “one form of wage labor may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labor can correct the abuse of the wage labor itself” (K. Marx).

ZNet Commentary
King Would Tell Congress To Value Workers
February 01, 2006
By Holly Sklar

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on the brink of the Great Depression and died fighting for the right of workers to earn a decent living.

On March 18, 1968, days before his murder, King told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN, “It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis…getting part-time income.” King said, “We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life.”

Two years earlier on March 18, 1966, King had called for Congress to boost the minimum wage. “We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage,” he said. “A living wage should be the right of all working Americans.”

King did not dream that in the year 2006, he would be remembered with a national holiday, but the value of the minimum wage would be lower than it was in the 1950s and 60s. At $5.15 an hour, today’s minimum wage is nearly $4 less than it was in 1968, when it reached its historic high of $9.09, adjusted for inflation.

The minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage. A full-time worker at minimum wage makes just $10,712 a year — less than $900 a month — to cover housing, food, health care, transportation and other expenses.

As Congressional Quarterly observed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, “In the Lower Ninth Ward and other impoverished neighborhoods of New Orleans, people have long waged battle to make ends meet… That was a nearly unattainable goal in a city where many of the jobs were in hotels and restaurants that paid around the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour.”

A low minimum wage is a green light for miserly employers to pay poverty wages to a growing share of the workforce — not just workers at the minimum, but above it. In its 2005 Hunger and Homelessness Survey, the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 40 percent of the adults requesting emergency food assistance were employed, as were 15 percent of the homeless.

A low minimum wage is a green light for greed. Between 1968 and 2004, domestic corporate profits rose 85 percent while the minimum wage fell 41 percent and the average hourly wage fell 4 percent, adjusted for inflation. In the retail sector, which employs large numbers of workers at or near minimum wage, profits skyrocketed 159 percent.

With the federal minimum wage stuck in quicksand, a growing number of states have raised their state minimums above $5.15 — Oregon and Washington are highest at $7.50 and $7.63 respectively. Studies by the Fiscal Policy Institute and others have shown that states with minimum wages above the federal level have had better employment trends than the other states, including for retail businesses and small businesses.

Dan Gardner, commissioner of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, says, “Overall most low-wage workers pump every dollar of their paychecks directly into the local economy by spending their money in their neighborhood stores, local pharmacies, and corner markets. When the minimum wage increases, local economies benefit from the increased purchasing power.”

In the words of Joel Marks, national director of the American Small Business Alliance, “Fair wages are good for business.”

Congress has taken eight pay raises since 1997, while denying fair pay for minimum wage workers. On Jan. 1, congressional pay quietly rose to $165,200 — up $31,600 since 1997. And unlike minimum wage workers, members of Congress have good health benefits, pensions and perks.

Wages are a bedrock moral issue.

It is immoral that workers who put food on our table go without health care to put food on theirs.

It is immoral that workers who care for children, the ill and the elderly struggle to care for their own families.

It is immoral that the minimum wage keeps people in poverty instead of out of poverty.

King would tell Congress to value workers and raise the minimum wage. We need a wage ethic to go with our work ethic.

Holly Sklar is co-author of “A Just Minimum Wage: Good for Workers, Business and Our Future” and “Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All Of Us.”

Rouge Forum Update (January 31, 2006)

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page has been updated, complete with a new Abolish ROTC poster that is more than one-half century old, and, with luck, not good for our lifetimes.

As usual, the page hosts several articles from Robert Fisk, one of the few western journalists with a grasp of the current crises, Here is one.

The Historians Against the War will meet in Austin in February 2006 and our friends in the Whole Schooling Consortium are hosting a conference in Portland on May 12.

As the economic attacks on working life in the US sharpened, with up to 30,000 layoffs announced at Ford, the UAW, which has lost one million members in recent decades, offered to do nearly nothing—as the rank and file at Delphi corporation, facing massive cuts, began to organize outside their UAW and New York Transit workers, following a three day strike, voted down a concessions based contract negotiated by union leaders.

Last, Substance News, edited by blacklisted educator George Schmidt (a Chicago teacher with nearly thirty years in the system before he was fired for publishing the hated CASE test) needs your support. Here’s the latest Substance.

There are several national demonstrations against the war coming up. Likely to be the largest is one planned for April 29th. Watch for a full description in the next Rouge Forum News.