toilet nation

2-29-08--The dollar hit another record low against the euro, deepening a six-year slide in which it has fallen more than 40% versus the European currency. WSJ A1

--... Those of us of a certain age remember it well, if painfully, and judging by the noises coming from the Federal Reserve of late we had all better get used to it again. ... Call it the Bernanke reflation, though it’s more precise to call it the Fed’s second inflation gamble of the decade. WSY, A16

--. . . overall the result is easy to predict: a regulatory pole will emerge in Eurasia, one closer to the geographic center of the world, and there will be a slowdown in the flow of goods, capital, and migration that currently nourishes the United States. The United States will then have to live like other nations, notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the population. . . –Emmanuel Todd, p. 199 (2002)

--The US incarcerates more people than any other nation, a study found, with more than 1% [1 out of 100] in jail or prison. WSJ A1 2-29-08

--For a long time before that in the United States it had not been safe to walk in the big cities at night: sometimes in certain areas not in the day. For years they had moved about by the grace of paternal or brutal police; or under the protection of some gang. (It was in the mid-seventies that it came out for how long the United States had been run by an only partly concealed conspiracy linking crime, the military machine, the industries to do with war, and government.) Whether he chose to be protected by the bully men of the gangster groups, or by the police, or by the deliberate choice of a living area that was safe and respectable and inside which he lived as once the Jews had lived in ghettoes, in America the citizen had long since becomes used to an organized barbarism. –Doris Lessing (1969) THE FOUR GATED CITY

--Crime has become ... central to the exercise of authority in America... Across all kinds of institutional settings, people are seen as acting legitimately when they act to prevent crimes or other troubling behaviors that can be closely analogized to crimes ... we can expect people to deploy the category of crime to legitimate interventions that have other motivations [e.g., squishing a fetus equals murder] ... the technologies, discourses, and metaphors of crime and criminal justice have become more visible features of all kinds of institutions, where they can easily gravitate into new opportunities for governance. In this way, it is not a great jump to go from (a) concerns about juvenile crime through (b) measures in schools that treat students primarily as potential criminals or victims, and (c) later still, to attacks on academic failure as a kind of crime someone must be held accountable for, whether it be the students (no more “social passing”), teachers (pay tied to test scores), or whole schools (closure a a result of failing test scores.) ...In France, a nation rarely shy about enforcing nationalism with law, schools are mandated to inscribe the words “liberte, equalite, fraternite” over their entrance. Today, in the US, it is crime that dominates the symbolic passageway to school and citizenship. ... Crime has always been part of the messy struggle for control of the workplace. ...
Jonathon Simon, GOVERNING THRUGH CRIME (Oxford, 2007) 3-5 , 209, 233

...by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world... Finnish educators believe they get better overall results by concentrating on weaker student rather than by pushing gifted students. The idea is that bright students can help average ones without harming their own progress. ... Teachers and students address each other by first names....[When a Finnish high school senior spent a year in Michigan, she had to ] repeat the year when she returned. ... There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. ... Finland has a high school drop out rate of about 4%--or 10% at vocational schools—compared with roughly 25% in the US... Each school year, the US spends an average of $8700 per student, while the Finns spend $7500. Finland’s high tax government provides roughly equal per pupil funding, unlike the disparities between Beverly Hills public schools, for example, and schools in poorer districts. The gap between Finland’s best and worst performing schools was the smallest of any country in the PISA testing. The US ranks about average. Finnish students have little angstata—or teen angst—about getting into the best university, and no worries about paying for it. College is free. WSJ 2-29-08 W1, W10