FSP-Microcosm News-Global Community Report: Wealthy / Affluent Indulgences

Showing posts with label Wealthy / Affluent Indulgences. Show all posts

Friday, February 7, 2014

In East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods want an educational divorce from a neighboring community where four out of 10 families live in poverty.

MSN News

Baton Rouge’s Rich Want New Town to Keep Poor Pupils Out: Taxes

February 6, 2014 12:00 AM ET

By Margaret Newkirk

Saying they want local control, they’re trying to leave the 42,000-pupil public-education system. They envision their own district funded by property taxes from their higher-value homes, which would take money from schools in poorer parts of state-capital Baton Rouge, home of Louisiana State University. They even want their own city.
Similar efforts have surfaced in the past two years in Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Tennessee, some of them succeeding as the end of court-ordered desegregation removed legal barriers. The result may be a concentration of poverty and low achievement. A 2012 report by ACT, the Iowa-based testing organization, found only 10 percent of low-income students met college benchmarks in all subjects, less than half the average.
“It’s going to devastate us,” said Tania Nyman, 45, who has two elementary-age children in the Baton Rouge system. “They’re not only going to take the richer white kids out of the district, they are going to take their money out of it.”
U.S. educational funding varies by state, often relying heavily on local taxes. The South, once notorious for segregated schools, by 2011 had the nation’s second-narrowest funding disparity among districts, according to a study by the Federal Education Budget Project, a Washington-based research organization that is an offshoot of the nonpartisan New America Foundation.

Dropping Further

Louisiana, however, scored worst in the nation, according to the study. A December report by three LSU economics professors found that breaking up the East Baton Rouge Parish school system would depress total per-pupil spending to $8,870 from $9,635. It would rise to $11,686 in the breakaway district.
Eighty percent of the current district’s students are black, and 82 percent poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school meals. Nyman and other district boosters say a split would set a dire precedent.
“Every affluent community in the state will want to create their own little school system,” said Carnell Washington, president of the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers.“They are taking money away that would help the entire school system and the entire city.”

Opting Out

Backers of the split, whose website is called Local Schools for Local Children, say the district has been failing for at least a dozen years, with some schools performing so poorly that the state took them over. In the 2011-2012 school year, six of 10 students attended a school ranked failing or almost failing by the state and the drop-out rate was 20 percent, according to Baton Rouge Area Chamber, a business group.
“Baton Rouge is one of the best job markets around, and the middle class is moving out,” said Republican state Senator Mack “Bodi” White. “Those who stay have their kids in private schools.”
About 30 percent of children within district lines were in private schools in 2009, according to Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives.
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Monday, July 8, 2013

Human breast milk has become a new luxury for China's rich, with some firms offering wet nurse services, a report said, provoking outrage and disgust among web users .

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Adult breast feeding report incenses China web users

Beijing (AFP) July 04, 2013 -

Xinxinyu, a domestic staff agency in the booming city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, provided wet nurses for newborns, the sick and other adults who pay high prices for the milk's fine nutrition, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
"Adult (clients) can drink it directly through breastfeeding, or they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel embarrassed," the report quoted company owner Lin Jun as saying.
Wet nurses serving adults are paid around 16,000 yuan ($2,600) a month -- more than four times the Chinese average -- and those who were "healthy and good looking" could earn even more, the report said.
Traditional beliefs in some parts of China hold that human breast milk has the best and most easily digestible nutrition for people who are ill.
But the report sparked heated debate in the media and on Chinese social media, with most users condemning the service as unethical.
"This adds to China's problem of treating women as consumer goods and the moral degradation of China's rich," said Cao Baoyin, a writer and regular commentator in various Chinese media, on his blog.
Xinxinyu has been ordered to suspend its operations and had its business licence revoked for multiple reasons including missing three years of annual checks, regulators in Shenzhen told AFP on Thursday, although the wet nurse service was not among the factors they cited.
Company officials could not be reached for comment by AFP.
There were nearly 140,000 postings on Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, on the topic by Thursday afternoon.
In an online poll, almost 90 percent of participants voted against the service, saying it "violated ethical values", a fraction over 10 percent deemed it a "normal business practice".
"People become perverts when they are too rich and tired of other forms of entertainment. This is disguised pornography," said a user with the online handle ricky_gao.
White Lotus, another weibo writer, said: "Please do not force motherhood to lose its grace and become ridiculous."
Other postings voiced cynical approval.
"It's just a business, nothing to blame it for," said A Xiao Shuai. "People are insensitive about ethics when there is money on the table."
Among the general population in China breastfeeding rates are low -- just 28 percent according to a 2012 UNICEF report -- due to time limits on maternity leave and aggressive marketing of formula.