When the gavel struck Jan. 11 that brought the 2010 Georgia General Assembly into session, it was predicted the 40 days of lawmaking would last until late March. Wrong. It finally came to its constitutionally mandated close at midnight April 29.
So what did they accomplish? They succeeded in handing out a few unaffordable tax cuts, all the while eliminating tax credits of low-income residents and balancing the budget on the backs of public education, hospitals and a plethora of fee increases.
There was good, bad, ugly and ridiculous. You decide where the following items fit.Read more: http://www.macon.com/2010/05/02/1113277/sine-die-doesnt-mean-thank-god.html#ixzz0mtk5KGron The governor’s agenda to come up with a pay-for-performance plan for teachers failed to get traction, though, like the little engine that could, he tried and tried and tried again.
It may be giving lawmakers too much credit, but maybe they understood the governor was putting the coal carrier in front of the locomotive. The state must have a student tracking system in place to accurately gauge student achievement and teacher performance, something that has yet to be developed. The more likely reason for turning back Perdue’s wish is the spectre of the looming election. None of the lawmakers wanted to feel the wrath of 120,000 teachers.
n Perdue also lost funding for the expansion of his Houston County horse park project. Even though it would have benefited Middle Georgia, it’s hard to justify spending another $9 million when teachers are being laid off and furloughed.
n Even as the state sends a stern message that this will be the last year funding the sports and music halls of fame, it’s jumping into bed with the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta to the tune of $10 million. Go figure.
The big gorilla in every room was the budget. Georgia mirrors the rest of the country as it suffers through this bad economic downturn — and it will probably take it longer, due to our reliance on construction, to rebound out of this recession pit. Lawmakers were forced to make painful choices. This session lawmakers earned their keep. A state budget of $21.5 billion was whittled down through pain and bloodletting to $17.9 billion about the level of the budget four years ago.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Another wrap up of the session...
Picasso at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The trucks won't load themselves...
JimN2010 183 days to go!
We have a great Democrat named Matt Roberts running against Steve Davis in the 109 so I've thrown my hat in to run for what is now a vacated senate seat that used to be held by Republican John Douglas. We're going to flip two seats locally. Both the 109 and 17 will bring two voices for working families in this state. But its up to us to make it happen over the next 183 days.
I know we can do it!
Here is a story that hit the press this weekend on my race...
The IMF and Capital Controls: Policy Implications
Short-term capital flows are once again increasing in developing countries, as the world economy recovers. In February, IMF economists published a paper which concluded that under certain conditions, the use of capital controls "is justified as part of the policy toolkit to manage inflows." In the past, short-term and speculative capital inflows have made it more difficult for governments to manage their most important macroeconomic policies, including monetary and exchange rate policies; and rapid outflows have contributed greatly to economic and financial crises in many countries. Video and audio from the event are available here.
Reza Baqir — deputy chief in the IMF's Strategy, Policy, and Review Department, which has responsibility for consistency in IMF policy advice across countries (including on capital controls issues) — and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, participated in a discussion of these issues and implications for IMF policies.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Think Goldman Sacks is to blame?
Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed
But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”
Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.
Researchers for this study and others pointed to a successful minority of charter schools — numbering perhaps in the hundreds — and these are the ones around which celebrities and philanthropists rally, energized by their narrowing of the achievement gap between poor minority students and white students.
But with the Obama administration offering the most favorable climate yet for charter schools, the challenge of reproducing high-flying schools is giving even some advocates pause. Academically ambitious leaders of the school choice movement have come to a hard recognition: raising student achievement for poor urban children — what the most fervent call a new civil rights campaign — is enormously difficult and often expensive.
“I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff.”
Visits to half a dozen charter schools in Cleveland and New York State show that high- and low-performing schools often seem to take pages from the same playbook. They require student uniforms, a longer day and academic year, frequent testing to measure learning, and tutoring for students who fall behind. They imitate one another in superficial ways, too, like hanging inspirational banners: “This Is Where We’re Headed. To College!” say posters in the hall of the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn, with campus scenes of a chemistry lab and big-time college sports.
But the differences in how schools are run, the way classes are taught and how school culture is nourished are striking. It is like watching two couples dance a tango, one with poise and precision, the other stumbling to execute the intricate footwork.
Is Europe Imploding?
The code words for this implosion are "Greece" and "Belgium."
Greece, as all the world is aware, is undergoing a severe sovereign debt crisis. Moody's has declared Greek state bonds to be junk bonds. Prime Minister George Papandreou has said, very reluctantly, that he would probably have to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan, a loan that would imply the usual IMF conditions requiring specific forms of neoliberal restructuring. This idea is very unpopular in Greece - a blow to Greek sovereignty, Greek pride, and especially Greek pocketbooks. It was also greeted with dismay in a number of European states that feel that financial assistance to Greece should come first of all from other EU members.
The explanation of this scenario is quite simple. Greece has a big budgetary deficit. Because Greece is part of the eurozone, it cannot devalue its currency to alleviate the problem. So it needs financial aid. Greece asked for European aid. The biggest and wealthiest European country, Germany, has been highly reluctant, to say the least, to give such aid. The German public is strongly opposed to helping out Greece, basically out of a protectionist reflex in a time of European stress. They also fear that Greece is the first of a line of others (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy) who will make similar demands if Greece gets such aid.
The German public seems to wish it would all go away, or at least that Greece somehow be thrown out of the eurozone. Aside from the fact that this is legally impossible, the country that would suffer most as a result, besides Greece, is surely Germany, whose own economic health is largely based on the strong export market it has within the eurozone. So, for the moment, we seem to be at an impasse. And the market vultures are hovering over all the eurozone countries that are in sovereign debt trouble.
In the midst of this, the now perennial Belgian crisis has reared its head in a particularly acute way. Belgium, as a country, came into existence as a result of pan-European politics. The collapse of the Habsburg empire of Charles V resulted in the partition of the so-called Burgundian Netherlands into the United Provinces in the north and the Austrian Netherlands in the south. The Napoleonic Wars led to the two parts being put together again in the restored Kingdom of the Netherlands. And the European conflicts of 1830 led to the two parts being split apart again, with the creation of Belgium in more or less the erstwhile Austrian Netherlands, with a king imported from elsewhere.
Belgium was always a composite of Dutch-speaking "Flemish" and French-speaking "Walloons," largely but imperfectly located in two different geographical sectors (the north and south of Belgium). There was also a small German-speaking zone.
Up to 1945, the Walloons were the more educated, wealthier ones, and they controlled the major institutions of the country. Flemish nationalism was born as the voice of the underdogs fighting for their political, economic, and linguistic rights. After 1945, the Belgian economy underwent a structural shift. Walloon areas lost strength and Flemish areas gained strength. Belgian politics became as a consequence a never-ending struggle of the Flemish to obtain more political rights - devolution of powers, with the ultimate objective for many of dissolving Belgium into two countries.
Bit by bit, the Flemish got more and more of their way. Today, Belgium as a country has a common monarchy, a common foreign minister, and very little more. The sticking-point in this arrangement is that Belgium is now a confederal state with three, not two, regions - Flanders, Wallonie, and Brussels (the capital).
Brussels is not only the capital of Belgium. It is the capital of Europe, the locus of the European Commission. Brussels is also a very bilingual city. And the Flemish are insisting on making it less so. The problem is that, even if there were to be agreement on the dissolution of Belgium, there would be no easy way to arrange the fate of Brussels.
The latest negotiations were so intractable that Le Soir, Belgium's leading French-language newspaper, proclaimed that "Belgium died on April 22, 2010." Their lead editorialist asked "Does this country make sense anymore?" At the moment, the king is trying, perhaps vainly, to recreate a government. He may have to call new elections, without much hope that the elections will produce a really different parliament. On July 1, Belgium assumes the rotating six-month presidency of the EU, and it is not certain there will be a Belgian Prime Minister to preside over it.
The Greek problem is the problem of spread. Will Greece's difficulties not be replicated - are they not already being replicated - elsewhere in Europe? Can the euro survive? The Belgian problem presents however an even greater problem of spread. If Belgium comes apart, and both parts are then members of the EU, will not other states consider coming apart? There are after all important secessionist or quasi-secessionist movements in many EU countries. Belgium's crisis could easily become Europe's crisis.
Of the two threatened implosions, the one symbolized by Greece is easier to solve. It basically only requires that Germany realize that its needs are better met by European protectionism than by German protectionism.
The Belgian crisis poses a much more fundamental question. If Europe were ready, right away, to move forward to a truly federal state, it could accommodate the break-up of any of its existing states. But it has not been ready up to now. And the world's collective economic difficulties have much strengthened the narrow nationalist elements in virtually every European country, as all the recent elections have shown. Without a strong European federation, it would be extremely difficult for Europe to survive a stream of break-ups. Amidst the political havoc, Europe could go down the drain.
There is a certain Schadenfreude among U.S. politicians about Europe's difficulties. What may however save Europe from any implosion is precisely the ever-increasing threat of the implosion of the United States. Europe and the United States are on a seesaw, on which as one goes up the other goes down. How this will play out over the next two to five years is not at all clear.
Georgia Power: Judge's ruling won't affect power plant construction
A Fulton County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of an environmental group Friday, but it won't affect Georgia Power's plan to build two nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, the company said.
The environmental group, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, filed the lawsuit challenging the Georgia Public Service Commission’s decision to let the utility raise rates to pay for the plants before they start operating. On Friday, Judge Wendy Shoob said the PSC acted illegally by failing to properly document a justification for the reactors.
“This is not related to the need for the project," Georgia Power spokesman Jeff Wilson told the AJC. "Construction will continue as scheduled on the new Vogtle units."
An attorney for SACE said Friday's ruling was a major victory for their efforts to stop the construction of the nuclear plants, which would be the first built in the U.S. in 30 years. The PSC contends the reactors are safe, but SACE attorney Michael Carvalho said the utilities regulatory commission doesn't have the facts to back it up.
“Can we really say this is a tried and true technology? No we can’t," Carvalho told the AJC.
Earlier this month, Shoob dismissed key portions of SACE's lawsuit, which sought to block Georgia Power's ability to charge customers in advance for the plants' construction. Shoob ruled it was too premature to contest the fees since rates had not yet been raised.
SACE proceeded with its challenge of the PSC's approval of the project. Shoob sided with the environmentalists on Friday.
A PSC spokesman said the commission will consult with its legal counsel before taking any action.
State lawmakers approved a law last year allowing Georgia Power, a Southern Co. subsidiary, to begin collecting $1.6 billion in financing and shareholder equity costs early.
Under the new law, an average household would see an additional monthly charge of $1.30 on its electricity bill starting in 2011. That fee could reach $9.10 by 2017. Supporters of the new law said the change would save about $300 million.
SACE, however, argued the law is unconstitutional and forces small, residential users to bear a greater share of the costs than large, industrial power users.
Friday's ruling does not affect the state law, Georgia Power's Wilson said.
“We applaud the Judge’s decision and continue to find it incredible that the Georgia Public Service Commission would put $14 billion of ratepayer money at risk on this project without properly documenting the factual basis behind this high risk decision,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.