Fatah Accompli

When Palestine fractured along party lines – Gaza turning to ultra-militant and profoundly anti-Israel Hamas and the West Bank to the more moderate Fatah – the West flatly rejected the authority of the Hamas and threw its support to the Fatah-led West Bank. Hamas used its newly found land base to launch attacks and lob missiles into Israel. Israel pushed its forces into Gaza more than once and created an international incident by firing on and boarding a Turkish ship bound for Gaza. And as I have recently blogged, as the time when the issue goes before the UN General Assembly is only few months away, the moment to recognize a new independent Palestinian state appears to be imminent.

But Israel stands fast against relinquishing its West Bank Jewish settlements and transferring power over its capital and holy city, Jerusalem (equally holy to Muslim, Jew and Christian), to a separate state over which it retains no dominion or control. Seeking some form of guaranteed borders and enduring peace, Israel is clearly not ready to let go over territories from which it expects militant strikes to be mounted against her people. It is a perfect storm that just got a lot choppier.

That Hamas and Fatah were at each other’s political throats served Israel’s grand plan. Worried over its future relations with the new military caretaker government in Egypt – a country that had maintained a working peace treaty with Israel through the Sadat and Mubarak years – and despite assurances from Egypt’s new leaders that the treaty would be observed, Israel was squirming at every suggestion that its relationship with Egypt would no longer be a simple maintenance of the status quo ante. But what was about to unfold shattered any illusion in Israel or the West that the new Egypt would adhere to the favorable pro-Western policies of the ousted Mubarak regime.

Warming to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-American government in Iran, the new military leaders were clearly charting a new course for Egypt’s future, away from the West and evolving more as a regional power with its own agenda. When Egyptian authorities brokered a new Palestinian unity between previously warring Hamas and Fatah factions, moving toward new elections in a reunified Palestine, the writing was on the wall for both the recalcitrant Netanyahu government in Israel and the ever-waning power of the United States.

The US loss in prestige in the Middle East was precipitous, both in its failure to achieve any movement from Israel toward a peaceful separation of Palestine into an independent state and in its seemingly failed military efforts in both Iraq – where the removal of a Sunni minority government effectively pushed Iraq squarely into the Iranian sphere of influence – and Afghanistan – where Taliban forces have achieve heightened levels of control over most of the country.

While it is unclear if the truce between Hamas and Fatah will hold, both the US and Israel have flatly rejected the involvement of Hamas in any going-forward Palestinian government, a position that may be politically unsustainable and one that has virtually no regional support. Hamas, which drew heavy support from Syria, may have felt weakened by the protests against its championing government there. Hence the time for the rapprochement seemed to be ripe, and Hamas played on Fatah’s own frustration with the progress of the US-led peace process. Hamas does not seem to favor negotiations with Israel, while Fatah still believes may bear fruit with the increased pressure from the “unity” government effected by the joining of Hamas and Fatah.

The guarantee of peaceful co-existence that seems at the heart of Israel’s demands appears as elusive as ever, but Israel’s hand in the dispute appears to be weaker than it has in years. It also appears that American influence in the region is slipping away. The United States looks like a nation in nascent decline, her political leadership locked in a struggle that threatens impasse at every turn, an economy in shambles looking more than ever like a country headed for the double-dip recession and a nation whose failed military policies are viewed in the region as varying aspects of a big and out-of-control bully.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it saddens me to watch as a seemingly hopelessly deadlocked Congress has never been less able to create a sustainable and credible foreign policy in the Middle East.

When a Teen Gets a Life Sentence

In 2005, the United States Supreme Court, with a very narrow 5-4 majority in Ropers vs. Simmons, held that imposing the death penalty on juvenile offenders (those under 18; the law since 1988 had protected those under 16) violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The case involved a 17-year-old involved in a plot to break, enter and murder a victim; their methodology was unspeakably cruel. They took their victim, Shirley Crook, bound and gagged to a state park, where they threw her off a bridge. In 2010, the court expanded the notion of cruel and unusual punishment to another case, Graham vs. Florida, in which a 16-year-old was convicted, as an adult of armed robbery with assault and battery in an incident at a local restaurant. The sentence was harsh: life without the possibility of parole. Once again, the court ruled that life without parole for a person under 18 was cruel and unusual punishment, but the case was clearly limited to situations where a killing was not involved. 130 defendants immediately had their sentences reviewed.

Indeed children, particularly teens, commit some of the most heinous crimes in America. While their hormones may be raging and while they may be more susceptible to peer pressure, for most of these perpetrators, they most certainly know the evil nature of their actions and have the ability to make reasoned moral choices. That a difference of a year, from 17 to 18, can have such a shatteringly different result in punishment is clearly difficult to justify – much more difficult than comparing a “life without parole” or death sentence of someone in their 40s, who have lived free for many years before their convictions, to that of a juvenile. And no matter what your feelings about the death penalty in general, it is clear that the extra expense to execute a defendant and the slight risk of killing a wrongfully convicted inmate weigh heavily in that moral consideration.

Today, there are approximately 2,500 inmates convicted of crimes involving a killing committed when they were juveniles who have been sentenced to life without parole; there are 70 who committed these crimes at ages 13 or 14. Lower courts have been unwilling to expand the decision in Graham to all juvenile offenses, including those involving a death, even where the convicted child was not the main perpetrator (and may have been a co-conspirator, along for the ride). Petitions have been filed with the Supreme Court in several cases, including ones involving that13-14 year-old category.

The April 20^th New York Times explains the facts behind three of the above cases: “More than a decade ago, a 14-year-old boy killed his stepbrother in a scuffle that escalated from goofing around with a blowgun to an angry threat with a bow and arrow to the fatal thrust of a hunting knife. The boy, Quantel Lotts, had spent part of the morning playing with Pokémon cards. He was in seventh grade and not yet five feet tall… Mr. Lotts is 25 now, and he is in the maximum-security prison here, serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for murder…

“[Another case] concerns Kuntrell Jackson, an Arkansas man who was 14 when he and two older youths tried to rob a video store in 1999. One of the other youths shot and killed a store clerk… The second case involves Evan Miller, an Alabama prisoner who was 14 in 2003 when he and an older youth beat a 52-year-old neighbor and set fire to his home after the three had spent the evening smoking pot and playing drinking games. The neighbor died of smoke inhalation.” That severe punishment is merited is not the question; it is the extent of the punishment that must be scrutinized. Indeed as some countries refuse to impose sentences beyond 25 years, the United States tends to impose longer and harsher sentences that most of the rest of the world. We have 5% of the earth’s population a nd 25% of her incarcerated prisoners. We need to determine exactly what the societal interests might be in keeping these individuals in prison for the rest of their lives.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while these cases seem so distant to our daily lives, how we treat those who have been convicted of a crime goes to the core of who we are.

The Eyes Have It

When Cisco Systems acquired Pure Digital in 2009, it paid a whopping $590 million. Pure Digital introduced the “Pure Digital Point & Shoot” video camera in 2006, a basic unit that provided an easily-uploadable digital recording video – originally to allow users to burn a DVD through their computers. Initially available through the CVS drugstore chain, the camera evolved into the Flip Video a year later, zooming to the top of the video camera charts, capturing about 13% of the entire market. It was the camera of choice for the YouTube generation, easy to use, easy to upload and very cheap. The little camera was everywhere as amateur directors were concocting their filmic debuts on the worldwide Web.

But cell phones were also evolving, pushed to do more as tablet computing and netbooks also provided additional attractive abilities and concomitant and totally ubiquitous apps; most of the higher-end newer model cell phones were increasingly able to record video… even in an HD format… and who needed a second camera to do what the cell phone was already able to replicate? As event exploded across the Middle East, deposing dictators and fomenting rebellion, cell phones with enhanced video capacities were the mainstay of news reports on sophisticated television channels like CNN, MSNBC and Fox. The images showed the world what was going on.

In mid-April, sensing the flood of competition, Cisco Systems threw in the towel, abandoning their Flip camera play to focus on their core competency of switching and routing systems for cable, telecommunications and the Web: “As part of the plan, Cisco will close down its Flip business and ‘support current FlipShare customers and partners with a transition plan.’ Cisco will also refocus its Home Networking business and will integrate Cisco umi [Cisco’s consumer-focused system that lets people connect to each other using videoconferencing on their HD television] into the company’s Business TelePresence product line. As part of the transition, Cisco plans to eliminate 550 jobs.

“Cisco CEO John Chambers issued this statement: ‘We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy…As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network’s ability to deliver on those offerings.’” TechCrunch.com, April 12^th.

But what is really forced the issue is “cameras everywhere, all the time.” Whether it is police crime-stopping cameras on the sidewalks of Manchester, England, traffic enforcement cameras (that result in automatic traffic tickets to the unwary) in Beverly Hills, business surveillance cameras in almost any store you enter, traffic flow cameras on freeways, infrared cameras mounted on police helicopters or some idiot with a video camera or video-capable cell phone recording away, a modern city-dweller in the developed world (add the developing world as those “personal cell phone documentaries” noted above will attest) has absolute zero privacy once he or she leaves their home. And who’s to say that there isn’t a camera perched across the street recording through the front window or someone with a miniature camera-bug conducting warranted or unwarranted surveillance. Somewhere out there are dozens of recorded images… of you!

I’m Peter Dekom, and all those big brother movies of a decade or two ago are coming true!

Is Obesity Contagious?

If you ask most folks, they’ll tell you that when they see someone who is beyond merely heavy, their appetite declines from the negative image. Others might add that seeing obesity doesn’t trigger much of anything in their appetite patterns. Well, according to a new study released by the University of Colorado, both categories of individuals above would be wrong. Margaret C. Campbell (Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado at Boulder) and Gina S. Mohr (also at the Boulder campus) reported the results of a series of consumer experiments under the title, Seeing is Eating: How and When Activation of a Negative Stereotype Increases Stereotype-Conducive Behavior, Journal of Consumer Research: October 2011 (published online March 17, 2011).

The April 20^th Time.com summarizes two of the experiments: “Campbell and Mohr put together a series of five experiments to determine the impact of the mere sight of an overweight person. In the first, the researchers recruited people walking through a lobby on campus, and showed them pictures of either an overweight or normal-weight woman, or a lamp. The respondents, average age 25, were asked to rate the photos for a future studies (a sham task), and then were allowed to help themselves from a candy bowl as a ‘thank you’ for their time.

“Those who saw the photo of the overweight woman took significantly more candy (an average 2.2 pieces) than those who saw the normal-weighted woman or the lamp (an average 1.5 pieces)… The researchers' subsequent experiments involved ‘cookie taste tests.’ As in the first experiment, participants were first primed with photos of either overweight or normal-weight people, or a neutral image like a tree. Then they were asked to rate cookies by tasting at least one (but up to eight) cookies presented on a plate. People who gazed at pictures of the overweight woman ate significantly more cookies than those who were exposed to the thinner woman. The difference held up regardless of the participants' gender or weight.”

That “contagion” appears, accord to the study, to apply even where physical proximity is not present. People whose social networks have an abundance of friends with photographs of heavier people tend to be heavier as well. These results support a “seminal 2007 study by Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, a political scientist at University of California, San Diego: According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. ‘You are what you eat isn't the end of the story,’ says Fowler. ‘You are what you and your friends eat.’” Time.com. Uh oh….

I’m Peter Dekom, and I guess these scientists came up with these experiments while they were sitting around chewing the fat one day.

When the Chips are Down

I have to say that the plunging math scores from American children seem to have been perfectly timed for the harsh economics surrounding the rise in commodities prices. We all know about gasoline and Middle Eastern instability. But cotton? In September of 2010, a pound of cotton costs a dollar. In March of 2011, it was $2.26 a pound. The price of corn has doubled in the last year to $7.50 a bushel.

The March 30^th Bloomberg.com also reported some interesting figures on commodities: “Coffee jumped more than fivefold in the two years through July 1994 and more than tripled from February 2002 to March 2005. Sugar prices rose fourfold from June 2002 to February 2006 and more than tripled from June 2007 to February last year. Cocoa advanced 242 percent from December 2000 to January 2003… Coffee, sugar and cocoa prices will rise five- to 10-fold by 2014 because of shortages that will mean consumers getting ‘swamped’ by food-price inflation, according to Superfund Financial…

“‘There’s a tremendous shortage of food, there’s a tremendous shortage of arable land,” [Aaron] Smith [managing director of Superfund Financial (Hong Kong) Ltd. and Superfund USA Inc, which holds significant commodities futures] said in interview in London. ‘Any kind of food products are going to increase.’” Well, yum! Anyone for a serving of over-population topped with a whip of desertification plus a global climate change chaser with that?

So what’s an industry to do? Mark up common items by vast multiples and watch the startle effect drive customers away? Or is there a better, perhaps more diabolical approach that takes advantage of the fact that most consumers don’t actually read labels and probably can’t do the math on the reduced quantities anyway? How about packaging that kind of sort of looks like the old bag, sack, can, bar, box or wrapper but actually contains less of the proffered product? Who’ll notice?! Not kids educated in our school systems, it seems.

The April 11^th DailyFinance.com did a size reduction analysis on popular brands and the packaging, and here are a couple of the “facts” they discovered. Kellogg’s cereal has dropped its Special K box by 15% or 2.4 ounces on average… and the price went up too. Guess it won’t be so special anymore. Won’t have as much to snicker about as Mars reduces their king-sized Snickers Bar candy bars by 11% (0.41 ounces) but keeps the price the same. Pepsico’s Tropicana Orange Juice “increased the price of its gallon jugs by 5-8% and stealthily reduced the size of its half-gallon cartons from 64 ounces to 59 ounces. This 5-ounce reduction represents nearly an 8% decrease in size.” General Mills’ Haagen Dazs is dropping 12.5% (2 fluid ounces) from a pint of its lovely ice cream. Pepsico’s Frito-Lay chips are contracting a mighty 12.5%-20% (more for corn chips, less for potato), but a Reece’s mini is falling by a whopping 31%! No piece of mind there! The Chicken of the Sea isn’t carrying the same tuna, shriveling 17% ( a full ounce).

DailyFinance notes it most certainly isn’t just food: “Proctor & Gamble recently cut the size of its Bounty 2-ply paper towel rolls from 138 sheets to 128 sheets. The company attempted to mask this change by advertising the roll as ‘25% thicker.’ Despite the increased thickness, the package reportedly weighs less. Proctor and Gamble competitor Kimberly-Clark has also reduced the size of its ‘Scott’ paper-towel rolls.” While I know this is an absorbing topic, folks who leave paper trails will be just a little bit harder to find. When you add all this up, the dollar buying less, unemployment still pretty high, home prices don’t seem to be moving up… well, kinds makes you want to… er… go limp and have mommy carry you home!

I’m Peter Dekom, and all this constant chipping away at our standard of living is getting to be a really gigantic piece of chip!

A Veiled Threat

With the massive migration of Muslims to France, particularly since the 1960s from former French colonies, the question of conspicuous religious symbolism has risen from limited popular concern to statutory ban. The controversy began in 1989 and accelerated into the 1990s as young Muslim girls carried their traditional head-coverings – usually the hajib or headscarf – into French public classrooms as sign of modesty and piety… and faced schools and school districts that occasionally banned such clothing, often articulating a difference between “discreet” religious symbols (like wearing a cross of the Star of David on a necklace) and “ostentatious” religious clothing (like the hajib). When students were expelled, courts usually restored the students’ status.

But emotion over the subject continued to accelerate, and many French citizens felt betrayed by a seeming failure by second generation daughters of Muslim émigrés to assimilate into what the French believe is their special secular and egalitarian culture, a segment of society seemingly more defined by their separateness than by their French citizenship. The word used – which means more than mere secularism to the French – is “laïcité;” it combines a notion of separation of church and state that extends beyond governmental actions into the actions of the people. Born out of a resentment of the ostentatious wealth of the French clergy, this cultural notion of laïcité was clearly embedded into the French consciousness in the establishment of the modern French Republic in 1789.

There were additional arguments in support of a total ban on such religious dress: “According to numerous feminist groups, as well as some human rights advocacy groups, wearing the scarf symbolizes a woman's submission to men. It is believed that permitting the veil in schools risks opening the door to other practices that exist in the Muslim world, and which pose even more of a handicap for women…^. It is often rejected that forbidding the hijab would limit freedom. Rather, it is argued that the hijab is not a free choice, but a result of social pressures (i.e., if a law does not forbid the practice of wearing the hijab, social pressure may render it obligatory).” Wikipedia. Many simply felt an undercurrent of anti-Islamism and abhorrent racism was the true driving force. Muslim women who chose the veil of their own volition spoke out, claiming the ban was a violation of their religious rights.

Whatever the arguments, the statute banning such dress moved forward: “In December 2003, President Jacques Chirac decided that a law should explicitly forbid any visible sign of religious affiliation, in the spirit of laïcité. The secularity law, sometimes referred to as ‘the veil law,’ was voted in by the French parliament in March 2004. It forbids the wearing of any ‘ostentatious’ religious articles, including the Islamic veil, the Jewish kippa, and large Christian crosses. The law permits discreet signs of faith, such as small crosses, Stars of David, and hands of Fatima. This parallels laws in Muslim countries such as Indonesia and Turkey, which also ban the Islamic veil in their public schools… In [September of] 2010, a public debate arose and France passed a law that bans the wearing of burqas, niqābs and other full-face covering in public. The law was constitutionally cleared so that it will come into force in April 2011. That debate and ban are separate from the above-discussed debate on the hijab in public schools, in that it pertains to full-face veils only but applies to all citizens in public spaces.” Wikipedia. Hoteliers fumed. Owners of pricey shops, where covered Muslim women spent fortunes on exceptionally expensive French fashions, freaked out. The ban was applicable to everyone, visitors and residents alike.

And the consequences can be quite serious… if the law is enforceable: “The measure … punishes those who defy the law with a fine of euro150 or a citizenship course or both. Anyone discovered forcing a woman to cover her face risks a year in prison and a euro30,000 fine - doubled if the veiled person is a minor… Authorities estimate at most 2,000 women in France wear the outlawed garment. But for each of them removing the filmy cloth would be an exceptional act.” AOLNews.com (April 4^th). April 11^th… is just around the corner.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s clear that such a law would not pass constitutional scrutiny in the United States.

My First Language is African

Language is at least 50,000, maybe 100,000 years old, as best scientists can tell. So if I were to ask you to muster your best resources and tell me where language began on earth or whether it was born in several places or started from a single area, how in the world would you solve this enigmatic question? Professorial brainiac, Quentin Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, used a complex matrix of phonetic commonality (read: stuff with common sounds) to trace adjacent linguistic regions and see if there were patterns of this sound-driven commonality and if there were increasing or decreasing similarities converging on or emerging from one or more different places. Atkinson had to reach way back in time, long before any written tongues.

“The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most… [Atkinson] has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language.” New York Times, April 14^th. “In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances. Thus a phoneme is a group of slightly different sounds which are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question.” Wikipedia. Did I mention that Atkinson is also a math wiz?

The good professor looked at 504 languages and, writing in the April 15^th Science Magazine (with a catchy, gotta-read-it-now title: Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa), tells us that all of the analytical computer models strongly suggested that commonality emanating from only one place: southern Africa. Thus, according to this study, all language was born of some ancient “founder” African tongue that was the mother of every other language on earth. In the formal discourse of the study: “Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language.” ScienceMag.org, April 15^th.

While some experts may challenge the methodology, there is genetic evidence to support the notion that southern Africa is indeed the birthplace of modern man: “Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language ‘is not something my method can speak to,’ Dr. Atkinson said.” NY Times. Philosophy, religion, history, biology, cosmology and astronomy are all disciplines that address the big question: who are we, and where did we come from? What do you believe?

I’m Peter Dekom, and big questions actually do keep me awake at night.

Unemployment & Robots

Repetitive monotonous tasks. Assembly-lines. Robots. We’re used to the images (above left) at automobile plants all over the world – where people once stood and welded, lifted, assembled, the work is now handed over to highly accurate robotic arms, each with a specialized pre-programmed capacity. Creating, program and installing each unit is expensive, and so we don’t see these machines except in high volume, high-priced product manufacturing. Financial collapse and the bankruptcy of Chrysler and General Motors hastened union acceptance of the inevitability of these processes just to keep the industry alive. Oh yeah, there were some pretty highly skilled new jobs – robot design and maintenance – created along the way.

But the long line of sweatshop assembly-line workers that we believe represents the lot of any emerging country today – the dues that need to be paid by any nation that wants to move up the economic development chain – may soon be taken away if modern robotics moves to the next phase. What would happen, for example, if someone were to create an easily programmed, lightweight, affordable robot – capable of performing an infinite variety of tasks with relative ease – that could be picked up and dropped into a human assembly-line to work alongside its “fellow workers”? Would that technology deny hope to billions around the world seeking a better life? Since we cannot stop that progress, the answer may be yes. Further, the advancement of such capabilities – from factory to field – may pl ace more than a few marginal manufacturing jobs in the United States in the “soon-to-be-extinct” category, putting a premium on higher-level skills, just at moment we are curtailing our educational expenditures.

Well, robot fans, the “someday” may be today. A Swiss company, ABB, has invented a robot with all the assembly-line skills (“Frida,” pictured above right), able to work 24-hour shifts, as a single replacement for a human worker or… obviously… all of them. The April 19^th Spectrum.com reports: “FRIDA, which stands for Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-arm Assembly (you knew an acronym was coming, didn't you?), is lightweight and compact -- a person can carry it using a handle that comes out at the top. To make it even safer, its motors have limited drive power and soft pads cover its body. The robot has 7-axis arms, each with a servo gripper for small-part handling. Inside the torso is a control system based on ABB's IRC5 industrial controller.”

Still slightly out of reach for most small manufacturers, “But it's easy to see a future in which robots like Frida drop in price and increase in intelligence to the point they actually do replace humans on production lines, since they can also work 24-hour shifts, won't go on strike, or cause other social problems.” FastCompany.com, April 19^th. And this headless critter isn’t likely to overstay on its coffee… er… oil… breaks either. But just think of the social disruption... and exactly whose future l amp will be dimmed.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s looking more and more as if can easily be replaced!

Educated Slaves

There was a time where a family could scrimp, save and with a little bit of help from a second mortgage or a reasonably-available student loan, put their kids through college. Second mortgages have reached near extinction, impaired financial conditions and Congressional belt-tightening have pushed tuition higher while cutting precious funding resources like Pell Grants and staggeringly high unemployment rates combined with severely contracted job opportunities have actually called into question the financial basis for getting a college education except in a few fields where such educational requirements still generated better jobs.

According to the April 11^th New York Times, the aggregate of American college loans have accelerated past credit card debt and will soon pass into the $1 trillion dollar mark; the average student today carries a $24,000 debt-load upon graduation with just a bachelors degree. In 1993, half the undergrads owed loan money on graduation; today it’s two-thirds. Professional graduate schools, primarily law, medicine and business, often leave their graduates with six figure loans outstanding.

Even the President of the United States staggered under student debt: “‘We left school with a mountain of debt,’ Mr. Obama said in 2008. ‘Michelle I know had at least $60,000. I had at least $60,000. So when we got together we had a lot of loans to pay. In fact, we did not finish paying them off until probably we’d been married for at least eight years, maybe nine.’… Even then, Mrs. Obama said, it took the royalties from her husband’s best-selling books to help pay off their loans.” NY Times. That was then… student debt has close to doubled today.

Meanwhile, prestigious universities, even Ivies like Yale and Cornell, are opening campuses – mostly in Asia and the Middle East – to generate graduates likely to continue these institutions’ tradition of excellence… and pay substantial tuition without requiring any financial aid. Indeed, American colleges and universities are busy recruiting overseas for non-scholarship/loan students to make up for the loss of students able to pay in the United States. Even the number one law school in America – Yale – has experienced a 16% decline in applications this year; students just cannot afford to apply anymore. We know the graduates of the foreign campuses of these great schools are keeping their newly developed skills “over there,” and even the young men and women traveling to the United States for their higher education are returning to their home countries with vastly greater frequency than in days past (when they really wanted to stay in the U.S.). Nice to know where are educating the scions of other nations to compete with us in the future.

Defaults on post-high-school-education student loans, particularly private schools, are soaring. What’s a young graduate to do without a job or the ability to service debt? The worst numbers are for those many “for profit” colleges and universities for which getting students enrolled, regardless of the consequences, is simply a part of “business development.” Sure, there are some limits now on how much of a very low income needs to be allocated to student loan repayment, but for the most part these loans have become life-destroyers for so many who cannot get out from under the boulders of debt they carry on their shoulders: “Deanne Loonin, a lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, said education debt was not good debt for the low-income borrowers she works with, most of whom are in default… Unlike most other debt, student loans generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and the government can garnish wages or take tax refunds or Social Security payments to recover the money owed. … According to the Department of Education, about a quarter of students at for-profit institutions defaulted on their student loans within three years of star ting to repay them.

“‘About two-thirds of the people I see attended for-profits; most did not complete their program; and no one I have worked with has ever gotten a job in the field they were supposedly trained for,’ Ms. Loonin said… ‘For them, the negative mark on their credit report is the No. 1 barrier to moving ahead in their lives,’ she added. ‘It doesn’t just delay their ability to buy a house, it gets in the way of their employment prospects, their finding an apartment, almost anything they try to do.’” NY Times. Repayment that used to take a few years can now embrace more than a decade. Meanwhile, the nation is sliding down the competitive ladder, constantly falling, as we find more reasons to deny our succeeding generations reasonable access to education. It’s a slow death by incremental strangulation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s not as if these changes are hidden from our political “leaders:” they are willing to sacrifice our future in support of their deficit reduction mantra.