.jpg)
Continue Reading »
Looking back on it all, it's not much of a surprise that any school run by Donald Moten would descend into virtual chaos.Good question.Moten was nearly 50 when he applied to DISD, but he listed a mere six years of work history on the application, even though the form instructs applicants to "Account for every year from high school graduation to present."
What did Moten omit from his work history? Well, his stint on the Dallas police force, for starters. It was a job that lasted only a few years, but was long enough for Moten to be involved in a fatal shooting of an elderly block captain and to later fake his own kidnapping.
... Now let's look a bit closer at the work history Moten did provide: A two-year stint at a Houston elementary school as a fifth-grade math/science teacher, and a four-year post teaching the same subjects at a Sherman middle school. That's it. A grand total of six years teaching experience. Why, exactly, did somebody at DISD look at that and see the skills necessary to be a principal of a large urban high school?
Having lived in Dallas for three years and the Dallas-Fort Worth area for eight, I'm pretty familiar with the area and SOC. And reading about all of this - from Moten's work history all the way up to the cage fights - makes me plenty mad.Some folks will probably wonder why we should even bother asking these questions. Moten is gone from the district. The cage fights are a thing of the past. SOC's new principal has the school on the upswing.
All true. But the fact that DISD is still, today, cleaning up Moten's messes is reason enough to ask how it was that he landed here in the first place.
Seems to me that now would be a good time to make it clear which public officials support workers, and which don't. Continue Reading »In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office found that the agency, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers.
In one case, the division failed to investigate a complaint that under-age children in Modesto, Calif., were working during school hours at a meatpacking plant with dangerous machinery, the G.A.O., the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress, found.
When an undercover agent posing as a dishwasher called four times to complain about not being paid overtime for 19 weeks, the division’s office in Miami failed to return his calls for four months, and when it did, the report said, an official told him it would take 8 to 10 months to begin investigating his case.
Might be Somalia:Somalia won independence in 1960, but it quickly became a Cold War pawn, prized for its strategic location in the Horn of Africa, where Africa and Asia nearly touch. First it was the Soviets who pumped in weapons, then the United States. A poor, mostly illiterate, mainly nomadic country became a towering ammunition dump primed to explode. The central government was hardly able to hold the place together. Even in the 1980s, Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, the capricious dictator who ruled from 1969 to 1991, was derisively referred to as “the mayor of Mogadishu” because so much of the country had already spun out of his control.
When clan warlords finally ousted him in 1991, it wasn’t much of a surprise what happened next. The warlords unleashed all that military-grade weaponry on each other, and every port, airstrip, fishing pier, telephone pole—anything that could turn a profit—was fought over. People were killed for a few pennies. Women were raped with impunity. The chaos gave rise to a new class of parasitic war profiteers gunrunners, drug smugglers, importers of expired (and often sickening) baby formula—people with a vested interest in the chaos continuing.
Somalia became the modern world’s closest approximation of Hobbes’s state of nature, where life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short. To call it even a failed state was generous. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a failed state. So is Zimbabwe. But those places at least have national armies and national bureaucracies, however corrupt. Since 1991, Somalia has not been a state so much as a lawless, ungoverned space on the map between its neighbors and the sea.
If the Shabab, which boasts Eritrean support, took over Somalia, we might indeed see round two of Ethiopia versus Eritrea. The worst-case scenario could mean millions of people displaced across the entire region, crippled food production, and violence-induced breaches in the aid pipeline. In short, a famine in one of the most perennially needy parts of the world—again.
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case scenario.
Apropos of nothing really, Cee-Lo's verse from "Fly Away" on Goodie Mob's second album Still Standing:
There's not many of us who fall into that category. And the least of those are the crooks and scam-artists and half-wits who created this deepening financial crisis.“The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.”
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
A couple of years ago, it would have been hyperbole to suggest that we would all be better off if the senior executives at all our major financial firms were people picked entirely at random out of the phone book. Now, it's arguably true. People picked at random would, admittedly, be likely not to have been to business school. They might not know a lot about futures or derivatives or put options. But so what? At least they might have been more likely to know that they were clueless, and a few of them might have had the common sense to ask questions like: will housing prices really go up indefinitely?
In any case, what's the worst they could have done? Bankrupted their companies with ludicrously risky gambles that fell apart once markets went south? Destroyed trillions of dollars in value? Brought the world financial system to the brink of collapse? Left taxpayers across the globe on the hook for trillions of dollars Bankrupted entire countries?
Oh, right.
