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You won't find them on the same side of many issues. But over the past week, the two state executives—the first a relative political novice, the second the son of a Democratic party icon—have both unveiled budgets that call for substantial cuts in school aid, cuts they argue their states can afford.
I've been writing about state elected officials who've been making the case this year that schools need to make do with less—or at least no more than what they've got now. Scott and Cuomo have made some of the clearest moves of any governors so far this year in pushing some K-12 spending into the path of the budget ax—rather than protecting it outright.
The Florida governor yesterday proposed a total budget of $65.8 billion, which would cut $4.6 billion from last year's spending plan, and reportedly chop 8,700 state jobs. Some of the savings will be poured into corporate tax and property tax breaks.
The pre-K through university budget reportedly would fall from $22.4 billion this year $19.1 billion; per-pupil K-12 spending would fall by $703, a 10 percent decrease. Scott also vows to save billions by making changes to state's public workers pensions system.
In unveiling his state's budget in person, Scott chose an unusual setting: a church in Eustis, Fla., in what the Miami Herald as a raucous, "highly partisan tea party event."
"We will save money by streamlining state agencies and consolidating overlapping functions," Scott said. "State agencies are not permanent fiefdoms. They are simply a means to serve the interest of the taxpayers."
A couple Florida papers are noting that Scott pledged during his campaign to protect school spending, so we'll see how that discrepancy gets explained in the weeks ahead.
The chairman of the state's Democratic party, Rod Smith, said the budget would "continue the failed Republican policies of the past decade that have left the Sunshine State with one of the worst economies in the nation," and called it "a frontal assault on the quality of life of every Floridian."
Cuomo, who is attempting to close a $10 billion state budget deficit, recently released a spending plan that will decrease overall state spending by 2.7 percent, to $132.9 billion, for fiscal year 2011-2012. It also cuts 7.3 percent from state spending on schools, from $20.9 billion to $19.4 billion—a major shift in a state where, as the Cuomo has noted, school aid was scheduled to grow at 13 percent next year.
The New York governor's budget calls for a "gap elimination adjustment" of $2.8 billion next year—a loss funding partly meant to reflect the $1.3 billion in federal stimulus aid. The cuts to low-income districts would be proportionately smaller than those to high-income systems.
As I noted in a story a few weeks ago, the governor's plan also seeks to create a pair of competitive programs, each worth $250 million, to reward districts for making academic and financial improvements.
Cuomo's budget would also introduce competitition into the process for districts seeking a portion of $2.66 billion in school-construction funds, according to a summary of his spending plan.
The governor said he wanted to close the state's budget shortfall without raising taxes or borrowing. At present, the state's problem is spending, he says, noting that it's growing at a rate that has outstripped tax receipts, personal income, and inflation.
"We cannot just keep throwing money at the problem," said Cuomo, in releasing his spending plan. "More funds does not mean better health care, or better schools, or better programs. The change must start with a look at the programs: Do they work for the patient, the student, the New Yorker."
This article was originally published by Coda Story.
This was something this year’s Moscow Urban Forum, one of the biggest city events in Moscow dedicated to city planning and urban development, definitely would be remembered for.
An entire floor of a residential building with four life-sized apartments (a one-room, a three-room, and a couple of two-room apartments), furnished, with water running from bathroom taps, was on display at the All-Russia Exhibition Center in Moscow between July 6 and 12.
These were apartments—“comfort class,” information stands insisted—Muscovites would get under a program seeking to demolish some 4,000 Soviet-era apartment blocks and relocate around 1 million people.
Announced by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin in February this year and endorsed by President Vladimir Putin, the program elicited unprecedented outrage among Muscovites.
At first, the idea to replace pre-fab khrushchevki, standard Khrushchev-era five-story apartment blocks erected as temporary housing, seemed reasonable. But then the bill outlining the program was introduced in the State Duma, Russia’s lower chamber of parliament, and it became clear that city authorities have targeted not just outdated buildings, but those in good condition, too.
After several months of small protests here and there, thousands of people took to the streets in May, unhappy about the prospect of moving from their furbished homes to empty new apartments that Moscow City Hall would choose for them.
To cope with boiling discontent ahead of both presidential and mayoral elections, city authorities launched a large-scale propaganda campaign aimed to convince Muscovites that they would benefit from the program. Judging by the life-sized apartments presented at the forum, Moscow City Hall clearly took the task of persuading people very seriously.
“It was a very powerful campaign,” admits Yuliya Galyamina, one of the activists at the helm of the protest against the program.
The propaganda wheels began turning in late April and early May, not long after municipal representatives from all the districts of the city invited residents to meetings to explain what the program entailed. In dozens of districts, hundreds of angry homeowners turned up, anxious about the future of their homes and worried by the lack of answers on the authorities’ part.
On May 2, City Hall released a preliminary list of some 4,500 buildings slated for demolition. Residents of those buildings, authorities said, would be invited to vote between June 15 and July 15 on whether they want their building to participate in the program or not.
Days after the list was put out, a dozen newspapers owned by the Moscow government—including Vechernyaya Moskva, a free newspaper with an overall circulation of 1.5 million, and numerous district newspapers—ran special issues devoted exclusively to the demolition program.
At least seven of those special issues featured a statement from Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor, entitled “Renovation is a unique chance to build a comfortable city,” the full preliminary demolition list, interviews with district prefects explaining why the program is a good thing, and testimonies from residents who desperately want to move to new apartments.
At the same time, Mayor Sobyanin upped his media presence. In May and June he gave eight interviews, according to his official website mos.ru, compared to one to two interviews during the month before Muscovites had started to protest against the program. These interviews were mostly devoted to the renovation plans and were mostly given to state-funded TV channels, which remain an important source of information for most Russians and a significant number of Muscovites.
The message was simple—the program is designed for the homeowners’ own good. Most of the khrushchevki are dilapidated, Sobyanin explained, and are dangerous to live in. Apartments in those buildings are small and stuffy, he told state TV channel host Sergei Brilyov while showing him an apartment in one of the new buildings.
Those new apartments, he explained in another interview, will be much more spacious simply because current construction standards stipulate bigger bathrooms, kitchens, and corridors. High-quality materials will be used in construction, and interior fittings will be “comfort class” as opposed to cheap default ones often used in construction.
Because of all those factors, the new apartments will have a 20-to-30 percent higher market value than the old ones, Sobyanin insisted. But most importantly, the new apartments will be within walking distance of people’s current homes.
Sobyanin’s promises were reiterated by other top-ranking City Hall officials in a further couple of dozen interviews. A nicely designed section about the program was added to the City Hall’s website, with pictures of new attractive buildings, cozy courtyards, and spacious apartments.
According to Galyamina, the civic activist, the advertising was effective in persuading people in her neighborhood in northern Moscow. “Some people believed this rosy picture and stood by it, repeating that they trust the mayor and everything he promised,” she says.
But many homeowners still remained wary. In mid-May, their distrust spilled out on the streets. Three major rallies over two weekends gathered some 26,000 people, which is comparable to the 2011-12 Bolotnaya protests against rigged parliament elections and President Vladimir Putin.
State and pro-Kremlin media kept the coverage of these protests to a bare minimum—some ignored them completely, others ran brief news stories without mentioning what the protests were about.
Rossiya 24, a state TV channel, aired a two-minute segment on the biggest protest that took place on May 14 but insisted that only “one in five” protesters lived in five-story buildings. The reporter added that “hundreds” of those protesters actually came to support the program.
The state-run Vecherniaya Moskva newspaper topped that. The day before the protest, it ran a news story about 35,000 people participating in small rallies all across town in support of the program. The story didn’t mention the source of this information, and these rallies were not reported elsewhere.
This was the message the City Hall sought to send: Most Muscovites support the program.
State-run pollster VTsIOM released three polls documenting overwhelming support for the program—80 percent of residents of the buildings on the demolition list. Daily updates about the vote in the buildings up for demolition rarely named a number lower than 90 percent of votes for entering the program.
The website of the Renovation Headquarters, created for the occasion, ran lists of buildings that were not up for demolition but participated in the vote nonetheless. Among those, according to the website, only seven buildings throughout the city voted against entering the program, and 292 voted for it.
These numbers were supposed to be updated as the votes came in, but they never were, even though several five-story buildings’ residents say they have submitted votes against the program on behalf of at least three other buildings. After the vote was over on July 15, these lists disappeared from the website.
What’s more, a Russian journalist, Alexei Kovalev, discovered groups and communities in social networks created in support of the program by supposedly ordinary Muscovites that are tired of living in awful, falling-apart khrushchevkas but in reality were groups run and promoted by companies and people affiliated with Moscow City Hall. “Those who genuinely support the program—real residents of old, dilapidated building—are the elderly; they don’t use social networks,” Kovalev says.
Finally, Sobyanin himself gave a speech at the State Duma on June 6 declaring “overwhelming support” for the program—at the same time the parliament doors were picketed by a hundred angry Muscovites.
Russian political analyst Yekaterina Schulmann said the Moscow authorities had hit upon a particularly fruitful tactic by characterizing the opposing force as a minority. “When people are told that they are an insignificant minority, that they are against the majority, they start feeling uncomfortable,” she says.
However, the affected residents are not the only ones targeted by this tactic. The Kremlin initially saw the program as a smart pre-election move that would make people happy and grateful to the authorities, Schulmann says. It didn’t look so good for the Kremlin when the protests broke out, so it was important for Sobyanin to report a victory after all.
And on paper, this is precisely what Sobyanin did. According to the official results of the vote, 89.8 percent of the buildings up for demolition voted for the destruction of their homes and to enter the program. Protests died down. On July 1, President Putin signed the controversial bill into law. The program seems to be finally given a green light.
But was it its aggressive propaganda that brought victory to City Hall?
In some cases, it probably was. Vazhnova says her attempts to explain the reality of the program to her neighbors failed because her neighbors stood by “what Mayor Sobyanin said”; as a result, more than 60 percent voted for demolition, which is enough to include their building into the program.
But when it comes to the big picture, Moscow authorities may have won a Pyrrhic victory that has little do with propaganda. Muscovites are weary of the government’s heavy-handed, one-sided communication style, believes Denis Volkov, a sociologist from the independent pollster Levada Center. More effective were the numerous concessions authorities had to offer, the sociologist says.
Fifty Moscow districts were not included in the program at all, even though initially Sobyanin had said all the five-story buildings in the city would be included. In some districts, the number of buildings up for demolition was drastically reduced from more than a hundred to just a handful.
Additionally, the bill outlining the program was significantly amended before passing. Authorities had to guarantee homeowners apartments in their same district, allowed them to contest the choice of their new apartment in court, and introduced an option for demanding a new apartment equal in market value or monetary compensation.
In addition, confrontations as big as this one usually leave a long information trail. People will remember that their opponents conceded. “Those who were against the program will remember that their actions led to something. That they won something,” says Schulmann.
Daria Litvinova is a Moscow-based journalist.
Can women save Japan's economy?
A lot of Japanese women know exactly how their careers will end before they've even begun.
Two paths are open to new hires at many big Japanese firms: the career and non-career tracks -- sogo-shoku and ippan-shoku in Japanese. They're often referred to as the "management" and "mommy" tracks.
That's because women typically end up in the non-career roles, which involve administrative jobs with hardly any upward mobility that ambitious people find very frustrating.
"Highly educated women quit because it's not worthwhile keeping that 'stupid' job," said Machiko Osawa, a labor economist at Japan Women's University.
The Japanese government wants more women to pursue careers to help kick-start its sputtering economy, but obstacles like the separate career tracks --- part of the country's male-dominated corporate culture -- are hindering progress.
About 3 million women in Japan aren't working even though they would like to, according to official data.
Some companies are doing better than others at improving the situation.
Women account for 9.1% of all senior managers at automaker Nissan (NSANF). That's above the 8.3% average for Japanese firms with more than 100 employees, according to Catalyst, a non-profit group that promotes women in the workplace.
Chie Kobayashi, 48, who leads Nissan's diversity development office, says the company was attractive to her straight out of university because it bucks the trend by not using separate career tracks. In 2005, she became the first Japanese working mother to be posted overseas for Nissan.
The company continues to draw women with its policies, including generous parental leave, flexible working hours, career mentoring and on-site childcare facilities at its global headquarters in Yokohama.
Nissan's childcare center at its global headquarters in Yokohama, Japan.
Other major Japanese companies, including Calbee and Shiseido (SSDOF), have also been singled out for their progressive policies on women employees. But experts point out that such firms typically have foreigners in senior management, often crediting Nissan's Brazilian-born CEO, Carlos Ghosn, with helping to improve the automaker's approach.
Still, even Nissan is a long way from the Japanese government's target of having women represent 15% of senior managers at private companies by 2020.
The business case is clear: having more women in executive positions or corporate boards can increase a company's profitability, according to a February report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which studied nearly 22,000 public companies in 91 countries.
But women on the management track at Japanese firms say they often hit the glass ceiling. Around a dozen women interviewed by CNNMoney recounted difficult experiences trying to convince male hiring managers that they could do the job.
Marimi Takahashi, 23, who joined the management track at a Japanese electronics company after graduating from university in April, says there is "such a huge difference between how male colleagues and I are treated." She isn't given the same kind of training and sometimes doesn't even receive assignments, she says, leaving her bored and frustrated.
It's also difficult to manage household duties while trying to keep up with the "salaryman" culture of corporate Japan, which is characterized by long working hours and socializing over drinks with the boss -- a sign of job commitment.
"It's so exhausting to keep up with this career track with children," said Natsuko Fujimaki, who previously worked at a large Japanese corporation and now runs after-school educational programs to help other working moms. "I have seen many women lose their ambition for working ... because we have to do everything by ourselves."
The government is trying to pressure companies to shape up: a new regulation went into effect earlier this year requiring firms to disclose how many female employees they have and their plans to support and promote them.
Japanese firms need to find ways to support women in long-term career paths, said Kathy Matsui of Goldman Sachs, who has studied the impact of women's issues on the economy. "Hopefully, over time, it's not just the government saying 'do this, do that,' but that there is also this initiative from the private sector," she said.
Nissan's Chie Kobayashi, who leads the company's diversity development office.
Nissan's Kobayashi hopes that the situation will eventually improve enough to make her current job unnecessary.
"This is the ideal, final goal -- that we close the diversity office," she said.
-- With assistance from journalist Chie Kobayashi, who isn't related to Nissan's Chie Kobayashi.
Five residents were honored for the change they’ve helped create in the community.
Levonia G. Walthour, who received the Louise Rogers Johnson Humanitarian Award, taught school for 46 years in Manatee County and touched many lives. Walthour belongs to many community organizations and set up a scholarship in honor of her son to help students.
“I feel so grateful to be chosen,” said Walthour, who was introduced by a former kindergarten student, Gwen McElroy.
Helen Cadoret, who founded Manasota SOLVE (Save Our Lives Volunteer in Every way), received the Outstanding Citizenship Award.
The award is given to those who demonstrate high standards of fairness, justice and King’s ideals.
The organization provides maternity homes and fosters education for young mothers. SOLVE is the only maternity home in Manatee County.
Johnny McKinney, owner of J&J Bar-B-Q, received the Seymore E. Sailes Small Business Owner Award.
McKinney also mentors youth, coaches youth sports and started a chess club at the 13th Avenue Community Center.
Manatee County Sheriff Brad Steube was honored with the Government Award, which is given to those who make a significant contribution to the community.
Steube spoke of the importance of discipline and encouraged nonviolence.
His message to parents and other role models was to lead by example. So often people show frustration and anger with children.
Alan Zirkelbach, who is a Palmetto commissioner and has a construction firm — Zirkelbach Construction — was awarded the Edgar H. Price Jr. Humanitarian Award.
The firm has given more than $1 million to civic organizations in the community over the years.
“There’s no way to be successful without giving back,” he said.
Also Friday, the ninth annual MLK essay and speech contest winners were recognized. The first-place winners read their essays.
— Executive Editor Joan Krauter contributed to this report.
A class action lawsuit brought by plaintiffs who buy cat food names Nestlé in allegations that the company knowingly buys fish products for its Fancy Feast line that are produced using slave labor overseas.
The class claims Nestlé has tried to hide its involvement with human rights violations from the public. Nestlé reportedly contracts with a Thai company, Thai Union Frozen Products PCL, to import more than 28 million pounds of seafood-based pet food, some of which is obtained through slave labor.
Thai Union owns a cannery, the Songkla Canning Public Company, which gets forage fish from boats that use slave laborers, many of whom come from Cambodia and Myanmar.
Interviews with these fishermen revealed horror stories of sick crew members being dumped overboard and defiant ones being killed, sometimes by having their heads cut off. Many workers are beaten for minor “offenses,” such placing a fish in the wrong bucket or not working fast enough. Still others are “sealed for days below deck in a dark, fetid fishing hold,” Ian Urbina of The New York Times reported last month.
“In all, 203 projects would continue while the state government had stopped further construction of 8,493 projects (that were approved by the previous BJP government)," Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel said in the Chhattisgarh Legislative Assembly Monday. Most of the projects relate to public works department (PWD).
“The state has a new government in place and we have our own priorities," Baghel said. The construction work of all the projects were stopped and would revive based on priorities, he said, adding that the state government would examine the projects before deciding whether to execute or abandon.