This just seems odd, and not really for the suicides, but why Al Jazeera thought it was a worthwhile story, and The Week picked it up in their email broadcast today. Seems anti-American-propaganda-y.
Do suicides really cause concern at an Apple factory in China?
May 27, 2010 By
Catholic Church Excommunicates Nun
May 27, 2010 By
In today’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes about Sister Margaret, a Catholic Nun who was automatically excommunicated after participating in a decision by a medical treatment team to terminate a pregnancy that was threatening the life of the mother. The pregnancy was three months along. The Church’s position is that the fetus’ life was more important than the mother’s.
The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.
I had known someone who worked as a doctor at St. Vincent’s hospital in the Village, and he told me that he was forbidden by hospital policy from so much as letting female patients know about the availability of the morning after pill, even if she had been raped. I have wondered seriously whether or not two of the hospitals to close in Manhattan were affected by their status in the community because they were Catholic hospitals – Cabrini and St. Vincent’s. Although they were closed for different reasons, I was surprised at the lack of community response to these institutions closing. I couldn’t help but think maybe it had to do with these hospitals placing their personal – and what should be private – religious values above the health and well being of their patients.
Tea Party Candidate Rand Paul: Doubletalking Racist
May 20, 2010 By
Rand Paul thinks that a bar owner turning away a gun toting patron because he doesn’t want guns in his bar is the same thing as that bar owner turning away a black person because he doesn’t want to serve black people. He actually thinks the bar owner is entitled to to do this under their right to their freedom of speech. That is baloney.
Here’s the first of many reasons why Rand Paul is an idiot: the right to bear arms falls under the Second Amendment of the Constitution and the right to be treated equally without regard to race falls under the Fourteenth Amendment. That’s something like 8th grade Social Studies, Mr. Rand… and 11th Grade American History… and probably some other grades in there too. Secondly, when local governments, private businesses and white people in general were given the choice of treating people equally without regard to race, the following happened: (1) myriad local governments passed laws making discrimination official and legal – “institutionalizing” it; (2) private businesses discriminated openly, all the time; (3) white people treated black people terribly, and in the south, frequently still do. In passing the Civil Rights Act, the government takes action to correct these wrongs. Oh and when I say “given the choice” I mean it was the law under Constitution of the United States of America!
This is actually a difficult interview to watch because of how Mr. Paul sleazily dodges the questions and Rachel Maddow has to bring him back to the question. The bit about Walgreen’s lunch counters is so over the top, it’s just nuts.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The really difficult part in all of this is that the central and overriding issue the Tea Party wants to stand for is fiscal restraint. The people who have migrated to this new quasi-political party are racist, though. They’re wealthy older white people. You have to read between the lines to see that much of what they advocate is racist.
I don’t know that all Tea Party candidates are as racist as Rand Paul, and thankfully I have other reasons for not wanting to register Tea Party. I’m pretty pissed off as I write this column today, but don’t let my enthusiasm stop you from sharing your take on this – especially if it’s a contrasting view.
“Freedom rings where opinions clash.” – Adlai Stevenson
Google Wave is now available to everyone.
May 20, 2010 By
Google Wave is now open to anyone who wishes to register for it. Get updates at googlewave.blogspot.com, or register at wave.google.com. I haven’t used it in about two months – it was excruciating. But I like the idea. Zenbe’s Shareflow is much simpler, but that lack of complexity made it easier for me and the people I was collaborating with to hit the ground running. There’s a free version, so check it out if you need to collaborate for a project that doesn’t lend itself to emailing back and forth. (Note, Google Wave is live and real-time, whereas Zenbe isn’t.)
Golden Key Honor Society = SCAM
May 12, 2010 By
Do not accept invitations for the Golden Key Honor Society. If you have grades good enough to have resulted in you being extended an invitation, then you should be putting your GPA on your resume, and not revealing that you were duped into paying the $80 to join a bogus organization.
Now there is really no question that the individual chapters and members of any given Golden Key chapter come together to do good things on various levels, but that is not the issue.
GK has some nasty history, as reported in a 2001 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The former executive director of the Golden Key International Honour Society received stock from a company seeking to do business with the organization and regularly asked employees to perform personal tasks, including writing his teenage son’s admissions essays for private school, according to documents obtained this month by The Chronicle.
The issue is that based on the current information on Golden Key’s website and annual report for 2008, their membership dues revenue was $5.7 million. (This is not their total revenue, just the money they scam out of college students.) The amount of money they give out in scholarships is claimed to be $600,000. That’s about 10%. Well, Golden Key markets itself as an nonprofit organization that gets good students access to scholarships. Would you like a pin to signify your membership? Cough up $25 more. A “good” nonprofit works on 10% of the money they take in and gives out the other 90%. Now in the case of the Golden Key Honour Society, they spent $2.4 million just on member recruitment – 44% of their membership dues went to acquiring new members. That’s not sound accounting for a for-profit company, and it’s certainly not sound accounting for a non-profit company. Can you imagine if The New York Times spent 45 cents out of every dollar of every newspaper sold just trying to get people to buy newspapers? That would be insane.
In 2008, Golden Key lost money, spending more money on expenses than they took in. It seems they hold on to too much money, and some investments went bad. What are they doing with all your membership dues money in the bank? Golden Key counts on you, the undergraduate college student, to be confused by these documents. They are not simply for rent and travel expenses. They are the salaries that they pay themselves to run the organization.
I know, if you were taken in by GK, you will be adamant that it is not a scam. So now I ask you, if I start a non-profit organization tomorrow devoted to the curing cancer, and I raise $100,000 but I pay myself $90,000 salary and donate the other $10,000 to cancer – wouldn’t you feel as if I was pulling a scam on you? If I rented an office for $36,000 for the year, paid myself $54,000 and gave the other $10,000 to cancer would that make you feel better? No, I have an obligation to the public trust to minimize my overhead and maximize the public benefit as a tax exempt organization.
According to its IRS filing for 2008: CEO John Mitchell earned $120,781; former CEO Alexander Perwich earned $307,735, and CFO Cedric Edmundson earned $138,125. Other salaries in the form of independent contractors – only five of them – totaled $1,291,006.
You can view the tax return for 2008 from the Golden Key Honour Society here. If you see any telling information in the document, feel free to comment below. There’s a rather lengthy article about someone else’s experience looking at GK here.
I contacted the IRS about the legality of Golden Key’s tax-exempt status and was told that it sounded as if it did not meet the requirements of the law, but that there was no hard rule about the % of donations that had to be put towards the mission of the organization.
If the top 15% of our class got together and pooled their $80 membership fees, what could they really do as a group? What could you have done with the $80 for your mom or dad or maybe someone less fortunate than yourself? Don’t kid yourself, the top 15% of our school equates to more than $192,000 in membership fees for Golden Key.
Seriously: putting your GPA on your resume will be far more impressive than a Golden Key Honour Society membership.
Wait, You Actually LIKE Goldman Sachs?
April 27, 2010 By
So I’ve been friending Baruch classmates on Facebook as part of trying to build my list of connections as I work on building this site, right? You people rock, by the way. There was this one guy who struck me as being a pretty cool, with-it, upstanding type of guy, but I don’t know him and really have no information to really have an opinion about him one way or the other. Well yesterday, there it was in my feed on Facebook: “####### likes Goldman Sachs.” WHAT? Are you kidding me? You actually LIKE Goldman Sachs?
I came to Baruch with a bunch of business credits thinking I would work towards an MBA. My second semester I took a Sociology class that blew my mind. A few years later I’m writing blog posts like this one. What happened to me? Don’t I still want to make a lot of money? Yeah, I do. I just don’t think I need to do it in a way that is at the expense of the well being of others. David Brooks, a conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times writes in his column today:
This spectacle presents Goldman with an interesting public relations choice. The firm can claim to be dumb but decent, like the rest of the establishment, and emphasize the times it lost money. Or it can present itself as smart and sleazy, and emphasize the times it made money at the expense of its clients. Goldman seems to have chosen dumb but decent, which is probably the smart narrative to get back in the establishment’s good graces, even if it is less accurate.
This stuff makes me crazy. Can’t we have it all? I’m not sure where this clicked in my head, but I believe I got from President Obama a message that people can be fairly treated in a competitive society. Can we be successful and care about the world around us? I say yes. But I’ll tell you I often find myself the cynical optimist. If I had a ton of money would I give it to Goldman Sachs to invest? Probably not. I recently switched my banking to a credit union so I could avoid ever banking using a for-profit bank. If you know me, you know my schpiel on mortgage points. But I realize I go to school with people that idolize and aspire to be part of organizations like Goldman Sachs and that’s a little unsettling.
Lloyd Blankfein is scheduled to testify today before Congress and I saw on the news that they expect the New York Stock Exchange to be silent while it goes on, and trading to be reduced today because of it. Yesterday, 1 Democrat voted with 40 Republicans to block a debate on the financial reform legislation.
It’s a very odd time to be attending Baruch, because more than ever, I sometimes question my association with a business school with a mediocre reputation for honesty and integrity. When the Professors come and tell you that they hear Baruch’s reputation isn’t great… well it can be demotivating to say the least.
What do you think of the current issues with the financial system and the efforts to reform it? Do you think Baruch does an adequate job of presenting itself as an institution that produces graduates with high morals, honesty and integrity?
You can sound off in the comments below, or submit an article post to posts-at-ibaruch.org. (As always, anonymous submissions are not accepted.)
Responding to a Comment Re: The Ticker (They’re Wasting Our Money)
April 25, 2010 By
While I was working on setting up the website (well I still am, this stuff is tough!) I accidentally had a setting set incorrectly that let someone register with a non-baruch email address. Our spam filter flagged the comment immediately, and I emailed the person to ask them to please post their comment using their baruch email address. I even copied and pasted their comment so it would save them some trouble. They didn’t come back. Here’s the comment:
I don’t think the Ticker spends $10 grand on photography equipment and hiring student photographers. This seems a little mean-spirited. I don’t think the coverage was all that misleading. The event was labeled and conducted as a protest, and whether or not there were motives behind it with the upcoming USG elections, it would have been MORE irresponsible of the Ticker to report about the event with the slant that you’re taking here. A blog post is allowed to have a scathing opinion of an event at school. A news article is not.
My response? The Ticker has several expensive digital cameras in their possession and the students that comprise the editorial staff take home 35% of the advertising revenues they bring in to the organization. There is one picture, and only one picture for a front page story. The truth is that there is more to the story than The Ticker reported. Have I taken a slant? Yes. I’m reporting on the reporting of an event. There’s nothing irresponsible in saying there’s more to the story — especially when I have the pictures to prove it. But I want to be extra clear that I stand by what I reported: I’m saying the story you got from The Ticker is not only incomplete, but by the nature of it being incomplete, it’s downright false, and I don’t believe it was actually attended by the person who wrote the story and gets paid a share of that 35% of advertising revenue of a business that our tax and student activity fee dollars go toward.
I’ll tell you that I didn’t mean to imply that The Ticker spends $10,000 on photography equipment alone, but The Ticker is apparently wasting your money. Whether it’s your tax money, your tuition money, or your student activity money, The Ticker uses a lot of it to produce a newspaper and pay themselves very nicely. According to Michael Wursthorn in a post on the Ticker’s website, the staff splits 35% of the revenue the Ticker takes in. He also claimed “the surplus” goes into the student activity fees. There is no surplus. The Ticker is funded through the communications budget of the school and student activity fees. If they were making a profit for the school there would not be any money budgeted to them. Since The Ticker has never operated in a transparent or democratic fashion, nobody knows what kind of money these people are stealing from you, and you just got tricked into paying more activity fees. (See “Did you know?“)
The above is taken from a copy of that web page that I printed out. It has since been one of those random removals you’ll find on The Ticker’s site. The Ticker staff will delete something from their site if they don’t like what you say.
Interestingly, on that date where Michael Wursthorn is addressing the student activity fees – this was before the last referendum that was disapproved – he says that The Ticker is not going to receive an increase in budget:
Well, in the new referendum, the “media” fee increased quite a bit for full time students, from $3.95 to $7.00. That’s so we can pay for a newspaper to be run out of the third floor and a few people who choose their friends to take over their jobs can pay themselves. You see at The Ticker, there are no staff meetings and no elections for any position of power. It is a purely nepotist organization in our public university. If you know anyone who has written for The Ticker, ask them, they’ll tell you.
If you’re wondering why nobody hasn’t said anything before now, I have. I have filed complaints in writing – not just in writing but in great detail (as if that wasn’t obvious, right?) – to Carl Aylman, Ben Corpus, Corlisse Thomas and Ronald Aaron who have given me one pathetic response after another, contributing a very bad reputation to Baruch College for their lack of interest in the utter absence of any ethics, morality or even faking the appearance of fairness at The Ticker. All the while, they run a business out of our school and keep 35% of the money for themselves. Do you think they don’t ALSO get reimbursed for their cell phones, luncheons, supplies and everything else they “need” to run the school paper? Don’t kid yourself.
So back to that $10,000 on photography equipment. I once applied to be an online editor at The Ticker, and was told several months later that someone else was hired for the position, who had less experience and tenure than I. When I asked why, I was told that I did not have knowledge in Final Cut Pro (a professional video editing program costing $999 at Apple) and Adobe Dreamweaver (part of a suite of Adobe products that sells for $1899 at Apple). The problem? First, nobody asked if I knew those programs; nobody ever contacted me about the position, ever. Second, if The Ticker purchased those programs they squandered our money. The Ticker doesn’t need to use Final Cut Pro to edit the videos that they post, iMovie is more than sufficient for their occasional YouTube video and comes free with every Mac they order – and they order them every three years apparently; and Dreamweaver is a web page construction program that they also do not use or need because they pay a third party service – part of MTV networks – to host their site for them entirely. These people are careless with wasting stealing our money. When I pressed the issue by filing another complaint to the Administration about unequal access to a student activity, I was told I would be considered for a position if I produced a portfolio of my work and I had to prove proficiency in the two programs to Michael Wursthorn. I was told that Michael Wursthorn would be the sole decision maker on whether or not I was hired as the online editor, and it was his prerogative to hire whoever he wanted. No elections, no voting by any group of members of the Ticker, just a Baruch student running the show hiring his friends. When I asked if the other people had to submit portfolios for the same position, I got no answer. I then applied to be a copy editor to the managing copy editor, and Michael Wursthorn inserted himself and said that I had to interview with him and pass a test in order to be considered for the position. When I asked if other people had to be interviewed by the editor in chief and take tests, I got no answer. Later, when my participation waned in The Ticker, Michael Wursthorn took over my email account without telling me beforehand, intercepted and read an untold number of private emails for an extended period of time. He defended that sleazy behavior to the administration claiming it was his right to do on behalf of The Ticker [as a paid employee].
When I contacted the former Baruch President, Kathleen Waldron after the leadershipless administrators previously noted, she directed me to school attorney (John Dugan) who expressed some serious concern and interest, or so I thought. I never heard from him again. His name’s not in the directory so I don’t know what happened to him.
If you have experienced similar issues with The Ticker, I encourage you to make your voice heard. If you do not want to contribute here to the site, then call the President’s office and let them know what you saw here and that your experience was similar. (But please do consider contributing here!)
Do the numbers add up?
April 16, 2010 By
The Ticker reports that Fix Baruch won the election:
President-elect Ben Guttmann received 1,061 votes, 209 more than New Baruch Alliance candidate Garam Choe. Independent candidate Zain Abbas came in at a distant third with only 119 votes.
That’s 1,389 votes. There are two problems here: 1, that represents a 50% reduction in the number of votes cast for our last election; 2, according to a tweet by Fix Baruch president-elect Ben Guttman, there were 1,621 votes cast at the end of the day Wednesday. (The election ended Thursday.) We believe he was given that information from the school.
The voting booth didn’t require you to vote for every candidate, do those numbers make sense?
Sound off in the comments.
Edit: I typically pride myself in my math skills, but finished my math requirements a LONG time ago; thanks to Jorge for pointing out the obvious error. A different post will be made for detailed election results.
Did you know?
April 15, 2010 By
When I asked a class of approximately 35 students if they knew that there was a referendum on the current ballot to increase the student activity fee by $50 a year (not including summer fees), only 5 students (including me) said yes, they knew.
Considering that the Microsoft mail system that presumably does not appear to cost the school any money still regularly sends Baruch emails to spam, and still regularly delays emails by random amounts of time, I would say that it was not OK to presume that one single email informing students of this referendum as part of a longer email about the student government election was an acceptable form of notification.
