Archives for May 2018

National Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the education funding consensus during this fall’s midterm elections, especially in states with key House and Senate races, like Arizona and West Virginia. Though most school funding comes from state and local sources, not the federal government, congressional Democrats have released a plan to repeal the Trump tax cuts for the top 1 percent of earners in order to spend $50 billion on teacher pay and recruitment and another $50 billion on school infrastructure needs.

“Teachers have huge impact in their communities, and they are mobilized and they realize the Democrats are on their side and Republicans have not been,” said the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York. “The No. 1 way you can get better teachers is teacher pay. Even some Republicans realize that. It’s sort of a free-market concept.”

In Kentucky, Travis Brenda, a high school math teacher, defeated the speaker of the State House of Representatives, Jonathan Shell, in the Republican primary. Mr. Shell had drawn the ire of the teacher movement by backing a plan to make educators’ retirement plans more like the 401(k) accounts used in the private sector, and by passing a budget that teachers said devoted too little money to prekindergarten programs, textbooks, school transportation and teachers’ professional development.

Support for teachers hasn’t always translated into support for more education funding — at least when that funding meant higher tax bills. Oklahoma, for example, repeatedly cut taxes, leading to stagnant teacher pay, aging textbooks and a four-day school week in some rural districts. In 2016, voters there rejected a ballot initiative that would have imposed a 1 percent sales tax to help fund public schools. The teacher protest movement, which mounted a nine-day walkout, won an average raise of $6,000 per year for teachers, funded through new taxes on oil and gas production, online sales, gambling, tobacco and motor fuels.

The walkout movement first took hold in West Virginia among rank-and-file educators who organized on Facebook, but quickly became closely tied to unions, which provided much of the organizing and lobbying muscle. While the Times survey found broad support for teachers, opinions on their unions were split, with 34 percent of adults saying unions are “part of the problem” with public education, and an equal number saying unions are part of the solution. Views on teachers’ unions showed a clear partisan split, with a majority of Democrats in favor of unions and a majority of Republicans opposing them.

Doug Brown, a firefighter in Phoenix, where tens of thousands of picketing teachers rallied for a week at the State Capitol in April and May, said that educators deserved the raise they had won from state lawmakers, but that they had been too quick to strike.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/teachers-campaign.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

When the World Cup opens in Moscow on June 14, soccer fans may notice something out of the ordinary. Alongside the slick ad campaigns for famous global brands — Visa, Adidas, Coca-Cola — there will be a proliferation of pitches from obscure companies with names like Mengniu, Vivo and Wanda. These newly minted World Cup sponsors aren’t selling much that is related to soccer; these three, for example, trade in dairy products, electric scooters and movie theaters. They all come from a country, moreover, whose national team has never scored a single World Cup goal and is not among the 32 qualifying teams this year, but which still sees itself as the future of soccer: China.

Beijing has made no secret of its soccer ambitions. Over the past few years, President Xi Jinping has vowed to turn China into a “soccer superpower” that will host, qualify for and, by 2050, hopefully win the World Cup. The last goal seems almost ludicrously unattainable: China’s men’s team languishes at No. 73 in the world rankings, behind juggernauts like Curaçao and Cape Verde. Yet the sudden appearance of Chinese companies as top corporate sponsors at this year’s World Cup hints at the country’s opportunistic rise in the world of soccer. Its incursion was precipitated by a crisis. Actually, two crises. The tournament host, Russia, and the sport’s governing body, FIFA, are beset by scandals and controversies that have cast a shadow over the event — and made it a struggle to attract corporate sponsors.

FIFA is still reeling from a hydra-headed corruption case that forced the resignation of its longtime president Sepp Blatter in 2015 and led to the indictment of more than 30 soccer figures around the world. Russia, meanwhile, has been excoriated in the West for everything from poisoning a former spy and his daughter on foreign soil to stoking wars in Syria and Ukraine and meddling in Western elections. When a member of Parliament in Britain compared this year’s World Cup to the Nazi Olympics in 1936, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, agreed, lamenting the “emetic prospect of Putin glorying in this sporting event.” The friendly veneer of the world’s most popular sporting event has been stripped away. “The Russians’ earlier rhetoric about the World Cup — ‘We want to welcome the world’ — is largely gone,” says Sven Daniel Wolfe, an expert on Russian sporting politics at the University of Lausanne. “Russian elites are done trying to integrate with the West. They are very content now to tout their ‘eastward pivot.’ ”

After television broadcasting rights, corporate sponsorships account for the largest portion of FIFA’s revenue — some $1.58 billion (out of $4.8 billion in total revenue) at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Companies have vied for sponsorship slots, eager to promote their brands before an audience that can number more than three billion over the course of the monthlong tournament. (The final game in Brazil alone attracted more than one billion viewers; the 2018 Super Bowl drew a little more than 100 million.) But scandals have changed the calculus. The fear of being associated with FIFA or Russia may have pushed away a few big partners (Sony, Johnson Johnson, Castrol) and scared off other potential sponsors. “We used to have top companies queuing up,” says Patrick Nally, a sports-marketing specialist who helped develop FIFA’s tiered sponsorship system. “Now they can’t attract any big names.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/magazine/china-wont-play-in-this-world-cup-it-still-hopes-to-profit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Republican orthodoxy is that inequality is not necessarily a problem. And if rising tides substantially lifted everybody’s boat, it might matter less that the yachts parked at the North Cove Marina a stone’s throw from Goldman Sachs rode a bigger swell. Tides in America don’t work like that anymore, though.

As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.

Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.

Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?

Our dismal rank, by the way, is not driven by the babies of white, affluent Americans. The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.

This set of facts seems to me problematic. Your heart doesn’t even have to bleed to care. The United States risks its prosperity by leaving so many Americans behind.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/business/economy/social-cost-american-exceptionalism.html?partner=rss&emc=rss