By Matt Zeitlin

I had a job in the great north woods, working as a cook for a spell

- Eric Hobsbawm: eminent historian, occasional Stalin apologist, jazz critic

- I know it’s not Politico’s style, but it would be nice if they could at least allude to a way in which Obama’s response to the BP spill has erred on policy grounds.

- When people are formulating arguments in favor of rich people paying less in taxes, we should be suspicious of any and all claims they make.

- The case against Field of Dreams.

- We don’t have to care very much the complaints of people who are going to spend four hours in cold for the 2014 Super Bowl in New Jersey, but I think one can make a fair case that inclement weather makes football worse for the spectator.

- I’m a big Jonathan Franzen fan, and his recent short fiction in the New Yorker has been quite good. It would be cool to hear from the feminist blogosphere on the one from this week’s issue.

I know it’s a pretty clichéd Dylan song to pick, but YouTube is pretty sparse with good videos, so in honor of Robert Zimmerman’s 69th birthday, here’s Tangled Up in Blue.

By Jamelle Bouie

This is a bit old, but it’s worth commenting on regardless. Nick Kristof — an otherwise admirable guy — thinks it’s appropriate to chastise poor Africans for their consumption choices in the pages of the New York Times:

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

Kristof comments that this “probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous” and well, it does. Kristof comes dangerously close to sounding like the domestic commentators who blame the problems of inner-city African-Americans on a lack of personal responsibility and some kind of unique black “pathology.” These are the folks that chastise poor blacks for owning cell phones or drinking alcohol, as if that — and not broader systemic problems — is to blame for their poverty. Indeed, I’ll go ahead and quote South African blogger Sean Jacob’s charge that Kristof all but endorses “19th century views in which Westerners, and particularly white Westerners, decide whats good for poor, third world, mostly black, particularly black people.”

The truth is that there isn’t much evidence to suggest that the African poor — or the poor more generally — are any more short-sighted and foolish than their wealthier counterparts, domestically and abroad. Indeed, there is plenty to suggest that the world’s poor live fairly sophisticated economic lives, and are more than capable of saving and planning for the future. The lazy stereotype of the irresponsible poor is just that, a lazy stereotype. While poor spending choices undoubtedly prevent the progress of many poor people, ultimately, mass poverty is a systemic problem. And I think Kristof would agree; towards the end of his column, he makes good points about developing systems that would encourage more and greater saving in poor countries. Unfortunately, that decent suggestion is overshadowed by the rest of his “sanctimonious, haughty and callous” column.

By Jamelle Bouie

It seems that segregation is making it’s way back into New Orleans’ public schools:

Three out of five schools are dominated by minorities with fewer than 30 percent of their attendees being white. Of those schools, 84 percent of them are considered “very high poverty schools,” where more than 75 percent of students qualify for either free or reduced-fee lunches. Fewer than 20 percent of white students in the New Orleans region attend very high poverty schools (in contrast to 65 percent of black students).

More than 55 percent of the students in New Orleans attend charter schools, which the report insists are contributing to the disparities, in some cases, by skimming better kids by setting high qualifications for incoming students.

The unfortunate reality is that school resegregation* isn’t a new trend; since the mid-1990s, African-American and Latino students have been dramatically more likely to attend schools where they are a significant majority. At present, about one-sixth of African-American students and one-ninth of Latino students attend schools that are at least 99 percent minority. What’s more, these schools tend to be very high poverty, and educational outcomes suffer hugely in schools where the majority of students come from high poverty backgrounds.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of school resegregation. Minorities make up a higher percentage of the population than they did a decade ago, and Latinos especially are concentrated in a few geographical regions. This feeds into housing segregation, which feeds into school resegregation. What’s more, there’s some evidence to suggest that charter schools are pushing some school districts towards inadvertent resegregation, as white students leave standard public schools.

Of course, you can’t discount the ongoing effort on part of the Supreme Court’s conservatives to dismantle mandated desegregation. In the 1991 Dowell case, the Court ruled that a federal desegregation order could be ended even if it subsequently resulted in re-segregation. The next year in Freeman v. Pitts, the Court held that a school district that had been under judicial review for school segregation could be freed of this review, even if some desegregation targets remained. This was followed by the 1995 Missouri v. Jenkins case, where the Court overturned a lower court ruling that the state of Missouri had to correct for de facto segregation in its schools. And in 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts — writing for himself, Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito — ruled that racial balancing for the purpose of diversity is unconstitutional.

So to keep this short, not only have demographic and educational trends pushed schools towards resegregation, but there has been an active effort to prevent federal and state governments from mandating desegregation, under the idea that — expressed best by Chief Justice Roberts — “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

*It’s not the best term, since this is a radically different species than the segregation of old, but it is the most descriptive, and so I will continue to use it.