Krugman on OWS

October 16, 2011

Losing Their Immunity

By PAUL KRUGMAN

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, the response from the movement’s targets has gradually changed: contemptuous dismissal has been replaced by whining. (A reader of my blog suggests that we start calling our ruling class the “kvetchocracy.”) The modern lords of finance look at the protesters and ask, Don’t they understand what we’ve done for the U.S. economy?
The answer is: yes, many of the protesters do understand what Wall Street and more generally the nation’s economic elite have done for us. And that’s why they’re protesting.
On Saturday The Times reported what people in the financial industry are saying privately about the protests. My favorite quote came from an unnamed money manager who declared, “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it.”
This is deeply unfair to American workers, who are good at lots of things, and could be even better if we made adequate investments in education and infrastructure. But to the extent that America has lagged in everything except financial services, shouldn’t the question be why, and whether it’s a trend we want to continue?
For the financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.
Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.
Oh, and taxes on the wealthy were, of course, sharply reduced.
All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation — and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.
Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.
And what about the current situation? Wall Street pay has rebounded even as ordinary workers continue to suffer from high unemployment and falling real wages. Yet it’s harder than ever to see what, if anything, financiers are doing to earn that money.
Why, then, does Wall Street expect anyone to take its whining seriously? That money manager claiming that finance is the only thing America does well also complained that New York’s two Democratic senators aren’t on his side, declaring that “They need to understand who their constituency is.” Actually, they surely know very well who their constituency is — and even in New York, 16 out of 17 workers are employed by nonfinancial industries.
But he wasn’t really talking about voters, of course. He was talking about the one thing Wall Street still has plenty of thanks to those bailouts, despite its total loss of credibility: money.
Money talks in American politics, and what the financial industry’s money has been saying lately is that it will punish any politician who dares to criticize that industry’s behavior, no matter how gently — as evidenced by the way Wall Street money has now abandoned President Obama in favor of Mitt Romney. And this explains the industry’s shock over recent events.
You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.
And their outrage has found resonance with millions of Americans. No wonder Wall Street is whining.

Analyzing Meaning of OWS

Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience’

By BERNARD E. HARCOURT

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Tags:

economics, Occupy Wall Street, Philosophy, Politics

Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”
Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

With the Cold War decades behind us, a new paradigm of political resistance has emerged.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
When Zizek complained last August, writing about the European protesters in the London Review of Books, that we’ve entered a “post-ideological era” where “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” he failed to understand that these movements are precisely about resisting the old ideologies. It’s not that they couldn’t articulate them; it’s that they are actively resisting them — they are being politically disobedient.
And when Zizek now declares at Zuccotti Park “that our basic message is ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives’ . . . What social organization can replace capitalism?” ― again, he is missing a central axis of this new form of political resistance.
One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”

Lucas Jackson/ReutersA protest march through the financial district of New York on October 12.

The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.
Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.
It’s these outcomes that have pushed so many in New York City and across the nation to this new form of political disobedience. It’s a new type of resistance to politics tout court — to making policy demands, to playing the political games, to partisan politics, to old-fashioned ideology. It bears a similarity to what Michel Foucault referred to as “critique:” resistance to being governed “in this manner,” or what he dubbed “voluntary insubordination” or, better yet, as a word play on the famous expression of Etienne de la Boétie, “voluntary unservitude.”
If this concept of “political disobedience” is accurate and resonates, then Occupy Wall Street will continue to resist making a handful of policy demands because it would have little effect on the constant regulations that redistribute wealth to the top. The movement will also continue to resist Cold War ideologies from Friedrich Hayek to Maoism — as well as their pale imitations and sequels, from the Chicago School 2.0 to Alain Badiou and Zizek’s attempt to shoehorn all political resistance into a “communist hypothesis.”

Related

More From The Stone

Read previous contributions to this series.

On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.

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Bernard E. Harcourt is chair of the political science department and professor of law at The University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, most recently “The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.”

NY Mag on OWS

Daily Intel Main
occupy wall street
What Will Become of Occupy Wall Street: A Protest Historian’s Guide

• 10/14/11 at 06:00 AM
• Comment

Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev

When even a Fox News readers' poll puts support for the Occupy Wall Street protests at more than 60 percent, it's safe to say we have something of a movement on our hands. The demonstrations are approaching the one-month mark stronger than ever, expanding beyond New York to cities across the world. With no end in sight (but with winter on its way), one question keeps coming up: "How is this going to end?"
Mark Naison knows a few things about protest movements. A political activist and professor in Fordham's Urban and African-American Studies programs, Naison attended Columbia University in the sixties, where he joined the Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, he was part of a group that occupied Columbia buildings in opposition to the construction of a gym in Morningside Park. (It was never built.)
And yet upon his first visit to Zuccotti Park, Naison was confused. "It was the first time in my life that I had been at a demonstration that I didn't recognize a single person. It was very different — overwhelmingly white, countercultural, educated, and unconnected to the major movements in New York City," he noticed. But since, he salutes the group's exponential growth: "This now has catalyzed a huge variety of people who are dissatisfied with the way things are going politically, rampant unemployment, the increasing concentration of wealth at the top, and with the Obama administration. What I see here is a coalition of a variety of different forces concerned with social and economic justice issues that I haven't seen since the sixties. And it caught everybody by surprise!"
Todd Gitlin, also an experienced activist, served as president of the Students for a Democratic Society in the early sixties, protesting the Vietnam War and taking part in a Chase Manhattan Bank sit-in against South African apartheid in the spring of 1965. He also credits Occupy Wall Street's "many moving parts" and cites five forces that will dictate the path it takes moving forward: There are the people who initially organized and are sustaining it; the "outer movement," which includes older activists, unions, and community organizations; the Democratic politicians who have reacted positively; the political opposition, like Eric Cantor and his ilk; and finally, the police. "All of these forces can move these vectors in different directions," Gitlin says, but there are a few leading possibilities:
1. The Democrats Ride the Wave
Politicians have already started to associate themselves with the demonstrators (see: underdog NYC mayoral candidate Scott Stringer) and that's likely to increase as we get closer to Election Day 2012. According to Gitlin, "a certain camp of Democrats can try to benefit from this newly unleashed energy with something like a Contract with America, or a roster of demands that would appeal to some number of demonstrators."
This could include incumbents in Congress, like Nancy Pelosi, but might be more effective for those running as insurgents, like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. "It doesn't seem like a possibility that any significant legislation can be passed any time soon because of the Republican lock in Congress," says Gitlin. "But the energy of the movement can be put to use within normal politics depending on the adroitness of politicians. Will they make efforts to turn these people from marchers to campaigners?"
Both Gitlin and Naison say they've heard grumbles at the protests about voter suppression and wonder if some subset of the demonstrators might be mobilized into a "get out the vote" movement in support of Democrats. Such a path would certainly be met with disgruntlement from the core of the demonstrators, some of whom are already voicing opposition to politicians "co-opting" the movement. But Gitlin says such a track should be seen as a success.
2. A Third Party Rises
The worst outcome, according to Gitlin, would be the increased legitimacy of a third party that peels off left-wing voters from the Democrats. "Two words," says Gitlin. "Ralph Nader. It would be a disaster, as it was in 2000."
Naison is less sure the movement's effects will be felt that quickly and estimates, "This is going to take three or five or even ten years to see its influences materialize."
3. The Movement Splinters
Matt Taibbi noted that "the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street." But agreeing on a list of demands could be more than the fledgling movement can bear at this point in its development.
"It's conceivable that concrete demands could come," Gitlin explains, "if somebody distilled a program and said they agree to support every candidate who supports the program and oppose those who don't. That could be a powerful vector in elections." (See: the tea party.) But alternatively, "There is a utopian thrust to the encampments, who quite explicitly say, 'We don't make demands, we are the demands.' They have a community here and want to sustain it. All these forces will be contending."
A more extreme group could also materialize from within the Occupy Wall Street ranks, Gitlin said. "There are always those who want to ratchet up the militancy and if the police take the bait, you could have some ugly incidents that diminish the repute the movement enjoys right now. It doesn't take a lot of people to do that. It is disgraceful to say that there are mobs at work now, but there could be. It wouldn't be surprising, but it would be disruptive."
4. External Forces Take Hold
Friday is already looking like it will be tense, as the city plans to clear out protesters, purportedly to clean the park, but also to bar protesters from bringing in sleeping bags and other gear when they return. Also disruptive, assuming the park's owners don't act first, will be the weather. Winter is coming, and with the ban on building structures the protesters will be pressed to hold their ground against the elements. "The most important thing is keeping the movement together in operational spaces," Naison says. "The space issue is going to be key. The movement keeps building, but you're running this race against time in terms of keeping something outdoors." He floated the possibility of squatting in empty luxury condos or commercial spaces, as occurred in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The protesters could also find housing with sympathetic church groups.
While the weather may seem like a trivial issue in the face of Occupy Wall Street's growing momentum and legitimacy, the biggest risk to the demonstrations' proliferation may be if "the middle-class kids just get tired and go home. That would take a lot of steam out of it," Naison says. "The only problem is they might not have nice middle-class lives to go back to anymore. The economy isn't improving. What do they have as an alternative?"
In Gitlin's view, "It's conceivable that the movement could hibernate like a bear for the winter months and reemerge. Then it might have a different agenda depending on political arrangements. But the insurgent energy will still be there."

How the Top One Percent Ripped Off the Bottom 99 Percent

Tuesday, 10/11/2011 - 12:18 pm by Jon Rynn | 15 Comments As the financial sector sucks up more and more money, the rest of us are left making less and less.
Occupy Wall Street has put a spotlight on the vast and growing economic inequality in the United States. It now takes its place as a top progressive priority — perhaps the highest priority it has experienced since the Great Depression.

Underlying this greater and greater inequality is a shift of wealth from manufacturing to the top 1 percent and the financial sector. Over the past 40 years, the sectors of the economy that grew in output share grew very little in employment share — making more money but paying it to a small group of people. The sectors of the economy that grew in employment share did not grow in output share, meaning that a growing number of workers had to share in a smaller pot of profits. From 1969 to 2007, the richest 1 percent has grabbed 15 percent more of the income of the United States, to a total of about 24 percent. Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector has lost a similar 15 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This has led to a downward shift in income for the bottom 99 percent.
Let’s look at the shift among sectors of the economy in a bit more detail, because as finance has risen, so have other lower pay sectors. A good way of looking at the health of an economy is to see if there is a difference in how much income a particular sector, such as manufacturing or finance, pulls in — that is, how much of the economy (GDP) it constitutes versus how much employment it accounts for. You might think of this as what percentage of the economy each working person receives, viewing each sector as a whole. I will call this the “the ratio”: that is, the ratio of the GDP (value-added) share of the economy to the percentage of the employment share of the economy for a particular sector; I will always compare 1968 to 2009 (all data sourced from the Bureau of Economic Analysis).
Manufacturing has historically been the quintessential middle class sector because its share of GDP declined slightly, from 28 percent to 25 percent, between 1948 and 1968 in tandem with its share of employment (its ratio was 104 percent in 1968). Thus someone working in the manufacturing sector made an average income for the economy as a whole — that is, he or she was right smack in the middle of the middle class. Since 1968, the employment share of manufacturing has been heading down by .38 percent per year, so that it is now 8.7 percent, while its share of the economy is 11.2 percent. The average employee is making about 30 percent more than the average for the economy, most likely because so many of the low-skill jobs were outsourced (along with most high-skilled ones).
At the same time, the finance, insurance, and real estate, or FIRE, sector increased its share of the economy from 14.2 percent to 21.5 percent, while the employment share only rose from 4.4 percent in 1968 to 5.7 percent in 2009. So this sector went from a ratio of 322 percent to 376 percent; for finance alone, the ratio almost doubled from a fairly middle class 116 percent in 1968 to 197 percent in 2009. Real estate always had a ratio of about 1000 percent, which is one more reason, perhaps, that society should not encourage real estate bubbles. Overall, the pot of money has exploded without an increase in payrolls.

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So FIRE took about half of the share of GDP that manufacturing lost while barely increasing employment. The rich got richer.
On the other hand, in what is called “accommodation and food services,” or basically hotels and restaurants, the share of the economy moved from 2.2 percent to 2.7 percent in the 41 years between 1968 and 2009, but its share of employment rose from 4.5 percent to 7.2 percent; the ratio fell from 49 percent to 33 percent. The “health care and social assistance” sector, dominated by the health care industry, saw its ratio decline from 73 percent to 63 percent; its share of GDP rose from 2.8 percent to 7.5 percent, but its employment soared from 3.8 percent to 11.9 percent. The other sector that saw a major decline was retail, which actually saw a decline in economic share from 7.9 percent to 5.8 percent at the same time that its employment share increased slightly from 9.9 percent to 10.8 percent. Call this the “Walmart” effect: driving out mom-and-pop stores, leading to a greater efficiency, but lowering the average wage from 79 percent to 54 percent of the economy-wide average.
If we combine these employment “growth” sectors, GDP share moves from 12.9 percent to 16 percent between 1968 and 2009 but the employment share grows from 18.2 percent to 29.9 percent. The ratio fell from about two-thirds of the average to less than half. More and more Americans are employed by sectors that aren’t bringing in a large share of the economy.
So where did the employment and economic output of the manufacturing sector go? When it declined, most of the income went into FIRE and the top 1 percent, and most of the employment — such as it is — went into lower paying service jobs or has ceased to exist.
Counter to conservative ideology, the economic role of the government has actually gone down — at least when measured, as I have been doing here, by value-added data, which eliminates the effect of transfer payments. From 1968 to 2009, the share of employment for the federal government decreased from 9.7 percent to 3.8 percent, and its GDP share went from 6.9 percent to 4.3 percent, while for the state and local governments the employment share rose from 11.7 percent to 14.4 percent and GDP share went from 7.6 percent to 9.3 percent. So much for “big government.” FIRE’s share of GDP is at 21.5 percent, while government at all levels is at 13.6 percent. Sounds like “big finance” to me!
All of these statistics point to the need to understand the “natural history” of the economy. The health of a particular sector of the economy is a relevant political issue, as is how we might change the relative importance of each. I have argued previously that manufacturing is at the center of the economy. If we were to move from a manufacturing sector with 9 percent of employment to 20 percent, the economy would add over 14 million jobs. To achieve a change like that, we need to redirect our resources from the “economic royalists” and top 1 percent to the bottom 99.
Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.

Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty

Tuesday 27 September 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

(Image: Gottfried Helnwein)

NOTE: This article is based on the preface of Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students and Public Education" (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education), published by Peter Lang Publishing; First printing edition (July 30, 2011).

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

At the heart of this movement was a culture of cruelty and vulgarity that used education to produce a new form of political illiteracy in which there was no difference between opinions and arguments, reason and emotion and evidence and false statements. In this culture of illiteracy, science became a liability, thinking became an act of stupidity, anti-intellectualism became a virtue, social protections were described as a pathology and the social contract was dismissed as socialism. While social critic Michael Kazin does not mention the notions of education or public pedagogy in a recent New York Times article, he is right in stressing the centrality of education to the current right-wing-Christian-extremists takeover of almost every aspect of political and economic life in America - extending from the Supreme Court to the federal government to the dominant media-cultural educational apparatus. He writes: "Like the left in the early 20th century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to develop and disseminate their ideas. Their think tanks, legal societies, lobbyists, talk radio and best selling manifestos have trained, educated and financed two generations of writers and organizers. Conservative Christian colleges both Protestant and Catholic, provide students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious schools led by liberals. More recently, conservatives marshaled media outlets like Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to their cause."(1)

Education has become the political weapon of choice for conservatives, and they have had astounding success in using the mainstream and new media to drown out the voices of more progressive critics. The evidence is everywhere. For instance, The New York Times is currently advertising its Watch Education Take Center Stage initiative and the keynote address is being given by the politically and morally discredited champion of neoliberal education, Lawrence Summers. Given his failed presidency at Harvard, his utterly shameful role in contributing to the financial crisis of 2008 and the failure of Obama's economic policies and his crude instrumental view of education, why would The New York Times select him as an educational leader and beacon of hope for any kind of educational vision designed to address future generations? Other speakers include the likes of Chester Finn, whose views on public education are as politically reactionary as they are theoretically bogus. Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. It's endorsement of market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public, charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education. Also included are the usual list of charter school, corporate funded anti-union, public school cheerleaders for defunding and privatizing American education. Of course, missing from these dog-and-pony shows are progressive public school reformers such as David Berliner, Stanley Aronowitz, Jonathan Kozol, Marian Wright Edelman, Donaldo Macedo, and others who have been fighting for real educational reform for the last few decades. Nor is there any mention of the many local struggling social movements fighting for public education and the ever-dissolving protections of social contract inherited from the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society programs. Education at all levels is firmly in the hands of the rich, reactionary and the powerful. Is it any wonder given how invisible progressive forces are in this country that young people are not in the streets as they were in the sixties, refusing the future being offered to them by Wall Street and the moralizing Christian fundamentalists?

Of course, this is not merely a debate about education; it is really about the emergence of an anti-reform movement that wants to create armies of low-skilled workers and consumers for the privatized, deregulated and commodified world of the 21st century where a survival of the fittest ethic has been elevated to the status of commonsense. This is a world in which the culture of cruelty is now so commonplace that audiences clap when right-wing politicians insist that people who are terminally ill should die rather than receive government support; it is a world in which the legacies and injustice of slavery and the Jim Crow era now shape a criminal justice system in which capital punishment is largely used to kill black men while, at the same time, used by crass politicians to provoke political support and cheers from audiences who could have once sat in the seats of Roman coliseums watching people eaten by wild animals; the culture of cruelty is now matched by the culture of vulgarity - reality TV shows mimic the worst values of American life; celebrity culture is now so crude that it is worse than illiterate, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian become role models for legitimating a lethal combination of vulgarity and stupidity. The combination of vulgarity and illiteracy permeates American culture, particularly its political class. What is one to make of the current crop of Republic presidential candidates who claim, without irony, that climate change is not the result of human behavior; evolution is bad science; and in the case of the queen of idiocy, Michele Bachmann, ignore the most obvious scientific evidence about the HPV vaccine in order to make false claims about the value of this particular drug in saving the lives of young girls. In all of these examples, education becomes another way of making the larger public and young people either stupid or mindless consumers - even worse, both.

The American public needs access to a new political and educational vocabulary in order to fashion democratically vibrant educational institutions; social movements; community educational centers; bookstores; and a lively, independent press. Young people, educators, activists, artists, parents, and others need alternative media such as Truthout, AlterNet and CounterPunch as popular civic outlets to make education central to building the formative culture that would create new generations of real public intellectuals, youth activists, social movements and a vibrant range of public spheres. I have taken up this issue in my newest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values." The book points to how educators and others can meet the current attack on education, young people and democracy itself. It offers a new vocabulary for better understanding the crisis of education as a crisis of democracy and public life, and provides a number of suggestions for what new beginnings are necessary, all of which is outlined in more detail throughout the book. Below is an excerpt from the preface that forecasts both the swindle of education offered by conservatives, the billionaires and corporate power brokers and why it needs to be resisted with as much urgency and collective power as possible.

With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of times for public and higher education in America; public schools are increasingly viewed as a business and are prized above all for "customer satisfaction," and efficiency while largely judged through the narrow lens of empirical accountability measures. When not functioning as a business or a potentially lucrative for-profit investment, public schools are reduced to containment centers, holding institutions designed to largely punish young people marginalized by race and class. No longer merely tracked into low-achieving classes, poor white, brown and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools have now become stress centers for the privileged and zones of abandonment for the poor. Public school teachers are now viewed as the new "welfare-queens," while academics are defined less as critical intellectuals and engaged scholars than as a new class or professional entrepreneurs. Under strict policies imposed in a number of states by right-wing politicians wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of austerity, higher education at all levels is being radically defunded while simultaneously being transformed into a credentializing factory restructured according to the values, social relations and governing practices of large corporations. In both public and higher education, ignorance is not merely fostered, but embraced through the course content whose value is almost exclusively defined through a metaphysics in which anything that can't be quantified is defined as useless. Corporate pedagogy has no use for critical thinking, autonomous subjects, the stretching of the imagination, or developing a sense of civic responsibility among students. Teachers who think and act reflectively, ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the scripts of official power and promote a search for the truth while encouraging pedagogy as the practice of freedom are now viewed as suspect, if not un-American.

At the same time, amid all of the despair and foolishness on the part of right-wing politicians and conservative and corporate interests, it is not entirely clear that a spring of hope is beyond reach. As I wrote this preface, workers and young people were marching and demonstrating all over the globe against the dictates, values and policies of a market-driven economy that has corrupted politics, pushed democracy to its vanishing point and undermined public values. Unions, public school teachers, higher education, and all of those public spheres necessary to keep civic values alive are being challenged in a way that both baffles and shocks anyone who believes in the ideals and promises of a substantive democracy. In the United States, union-busting politicians such as Govs. Scott Walker (Wisconsin) and Chris Christie (New Jersey) not only want to gut social services and sell them off to the highest bidder, they are also symptomatic of a political fringe movement that wants to destroy the critical culture, dedicated public servants and institutions that give any sense of vitality, substance and hope to public and higher education in the United States.

As the meaning of democracy is betrayed by its transformation into a market society, corporate power and money appear unchecked in their ability to privatize, deregulate and destroy all vestiges of public life. America's military wars abroad are now matched by the war at home; that is, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have found their counterpart in the war against the poor, immigrants, young people, unions, public-sector workers, the welfare state and schoolteachers. The call for shared sacrifices on the part of conservatives and Tea Party extremists becomes code for destroying the social state, preserving and increasing the power of mega-rich corporations and securing the wealth of the top one percent of the population with massive tax breaks while placing the burden of the current global economic meltdown on the shoulders of working people and the poor. Deficit reductions and austerity policies that allegedly address the global economic meltdown caused by the financial hawks running Wall Street now do the real work of stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights, dismantling programs long associated with social services and relegating young people to mind-deadening schools and a debt-ridden future. David Harvey's notion of "accumulation through dispossession" has become a basic policy of casino capitalism. How else to interpret the right-wing call to tax the poor to subsidize tax breaks for billionaires and mega corporations? Despair, disposability and unnecessary human suffering now engulf large swaths of the American people, often pushing them into situations that are not merely tragic, but life threatening. A survival-of-the-fittest ethic has replaced any reasonable notion of solidarity, social responsibility and compassion for the other. Ideology does not seem to matter any longer as right-wing Republicans have less interest in argument and persuasion than in bullying their alleged enemies with the use of heavy-handed legislation and, when necessary, dire threats, as when Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker threatened to mobilize the National Guard to prevent teachers' unions from protesting their possible loss of bargaining rights and a host of anti-worker proposals.

Obama has joined the Republican Party, leaving us with a Republican Party lite and a Republican Party of extremists. We have become a culture of forgetting, obliterating both the legacy of authoritarianism that characterized the Bush-Cheney years, while supporting a new group of Republican politicians who resemble Bush and Cheney on steroids. We are more than a nation in decline; we are a nation moving toward the bittersweet simplisms, policies and values of a new form of authoritarianism. With any viable leadership lacking at the national level, both young people and workers are watching the movements for democracy that are taking place all over the globe, but especially in the volatile Arab nations and in Western European countries such as France, England and Germany. Struggles abroad give Americans a glimpse of what happens when individual solutions to collective problems lose their legitimacy as a central tenet of neoliberal ideology. Massive demonstrations, pitched street battles, nonviolent gatherings, the impressive use of the new media as an alternative political and educational tool and an outburst of long-repressed anger eager for collective action are engulfing many countries across the globe. In smaller numbers, such protests are also taking place in a number of cities around the United States. Many Americans are, once again, invoking democracy, rejecting its association with the empty formality of voting and its disingenuous use to legitimate and justify political systems that produce massive wealth and income inequality. Democracy's promises are laying bare the sordid realities that now speak in its name. Its energy is becoming infectious, and one can only hope that those who believe that education is the foundation of critical agency, politics and democracy itself will be drawn to the task of fighting America's move in the last 30 years to a politically and economically authoritarian system.

At issue here is the need for a new vocabulary, vision and politics that will unleash new democratic movements, institutions and a formative culture capable of imagining a life and society free of the dictates of endless military wars, boundless material waste, extreme inequality, disposable populations and unfounded human suffering. Central to "Education and the Crisis of Public Values" is the belief that no change will come unless education both within and outside of formal schooling is viewed as central to any viable notion of politics. If real reform is going to happen, it has to put in place a viable, critical, formative culture that supports notions of engaged citizenship, civic courage, public values, dissent, democratic modes of governing and a genuine belief in freedom, equality and justice. Ideas matter as do the human beings and institutions that make them count and that includes those intellectuals both in and out of schools who bear the responsibility of providing the conditions for Americans of all ages to be able to think critically so they can act imaginatively - so they can embrace a vision of the good life as a just life, one that extends the values, practices and vision of democracy to everyone.

1. Michael Kazin, "Whatever Happened to the American Left?" New York Times (September 25, 2011), p. SR4.

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Henry A. Giroux
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. His most recent books include: Youth in a Suspect Society (Palgrave, 2009); Politics After Hope: Obama and the Crisis of Youth, Race, and Democracy (Paradigm, 2010); Hearts of Darkness: Torturing Children in the War on Terror (Paradigm, 2010); The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (co-authored with Grace Pollock, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2011); Henry Giroux on Critical Pedagogy (Continuum, 2011). His newest books:   Education and the Crisis of Public Values (Peter Lang) and Twilight of the Social: Resurgent Publics in the Age of Disposability (Paradigm Publishers) will be published in 2012). Giroux is also a member of Truthout's Board of Directors. His website is www.henryagiroux.com.

Chris Hedges on Supporting Occupy Wall Street

The Best Among Us; Join the Revolt On Wall Street or Stand On The Wrong Side of History

Publication Date: 2011-10-02

  By Chris Hedges  

This is from OpEd News, Sept. 30, 2011.

See bio below.

by Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say "I am innocent" is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.

Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say "I am innocent" is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher.

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat.

Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children's children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us.

Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio,Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges' original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay "One Day We'll All Be Terrorists."

Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.

Hedges began his career reporting the war in El Salvador. Following six years in Latin America, he took time off to study Arabic and then went to Jerusalem and later Cairo. He spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the bureau chief there for The New York Times. He left the Middle East in 1995 for Sarajevo to cover the war in Bosnia and later reported the war in Kosovo. Afterward, he joined the Times' investigative team and was based in Paris to cover al-Qaida. He left the Times after being issued a formal reprimand for denouncing the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

He has written nine books, including "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" (2009), "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) and the best-selling "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2008). His book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His latest book is "Death of the Liberal Class" (2010)

Hedges holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. Hedges speaks Arabic, French and Spanish and knows ancient Greek and Latin. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has written for Harper's Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta, Foreign Affairs and other publications.

In Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street, Transport Union sues to block using bus drivers to help arrest Protesters

Arthur Schwartz of Advocates for Justice told me that he went to court yesterday on behalf of TWU to block the city from forcing bus drivers to use their buses to arrest protestors.  Here are some news clips below:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/03/bloomberg_articlesLSIKYP1A1I4H.DTL

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- A New York transit workers' union asked a federal judge in Manhattan to bar police from forcing its members to abandon their routes and transport anti-Wall Street demonstrators arrested for disorderly conduct.
The Transport Workers Union Local 100 sought preliminary and permanent injunctions today in federal court in Manhattan. The union, which said last week that it's supporting the protests, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to prohibit the New York City Police Department and the New York City Transit Authority from requiring drivers to transport such protesters.
A court hearing is set for tomorrow on the request, said Jim Gannon, a spokesman for the union, which represents 38,000 members, including about 9,000 city bus drivers. Drivers were ordered on Oct. 1 to convey some of the 700 demonstrators arrested over the weekend during anti-Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan.
"The actions of the NYPD on Oct. 1, 2011, amounted to a seizure of the bus drivers," Arthur Schwartz, a lawyer for the union, said in court papers. The police department "deprived the drivers of their liberty without due process of law," he said.

More Arrests

Five protesters were arrested today, accused of wearing masks near Liberty Plaza in violation of a city law, said Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman. Some protesters have gathered at the park, located a few blocks from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street.
Police commandeered about five buses after the Oct. 1 demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge and ordered the drivers to transport protesters who were arrested, including one bus whose passengers were told to leave, Local 100 President John Samuelsen said.
The drivers -- some of whom were ordered by their supervisors to comply with the police -- didn't resist, Samuelsen said.
"There's NYPD brass with guns on buses saying 'Move the bus, this bus is now under the control of the NYPD,'" he said. "What room to protest is there? It's not a transit supervisor you're dealing with."
The anti-Wall Street protests were thrust into the national spotlight this weekend when police arrested more than 700 people for disorderly conduct on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Demonstrators, originally walking on the span's pedestrian footpath, converged on the roadway and were arrested on Oct. 1.
NYPD Cooperation

Only nine of those arrested by the NYPD weren't released from holding facilities in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the union said in its lawsuit. Most of those arrested were given summonses and released.
"We have no intention of changing our longstanding policy of cooperating with the NYPD," Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city's buses and subways, said in an e-mail.
The union said today in its lawsuit that more demonstrations are planned and transit workers and their buses will again be used improperly by authorities.
"The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are continuing," the union said in its lawsuit. "There is a great likelihood that on Oct. 5, or at future marches, the NYPD will engage in additional mass arrests, and that they will act as they did on Oct. 1, 2011, and commandeer buses and bus drivers."
Union members who went to court this afternoon with their lawyer said they were told he was meeting with Engelmayer.
Elizabeth Thomas, a spokeswoman for the New York City Law Department, said in an e-mail that the city will respond to the union's request for a temporary restraining order. "We believe that the NYPD's actions were proper," she said.
No Imminent Danger'

Schwartz, the plaintiff's lawyer, didn't immediately return a voicemail message to his mobile phone or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment or update on the matter.
Samuelsen said authorities can only force people to assist police when there is "imminent danger." Local 100 members participate in "legitimate" police and fire department emergencies as needed, he said.
"There was no imminent danger here," Samuelsen said. "The protesters this weekend appeared to be marching peacefully, as is their right."
The case is Samuelsen v. Kelly, 11-cv-06947, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/03/bloomberg_articlesLSIKYP1A1I4H.DTL#ixzz1Zp6WslLR

Danger: Corporate Sponsored Charters Coming

A  new idea for charter schools, to be pioneered in NOLA: corporate-sponsored charters w/ admissions preference to the children of their employees: by means of which “a corporation can secure $8,000 in state funding for each child of an employee for the life of the charter school for a one-time investment of $8,000 per student.”

Talk about privatization!

Very scary…

My name is Richard Cohen.  I’m the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, http://www.splcenter.org/.   We’re currently involved in a case in New Orleans with the goal of ensuring that so-called “difficult” students and those with disabilities have equal access to the charter schools that dominate the educational landscape there.  http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/case-docket/new-orleans-special-education.   The case has particular significance in our view because the Obama administration has touted the NOLA experiment as a model for the nation.  We’re involved in settlement talks with the state now and are cautiously optimistic that we can come to an agreement.

There is another cloud on the horizon, however, one that we thought you might be interested in. It’s a law that was passed in the last legislative session in Louisiana that provides for charter school enrollment preferences for children of corporate employees in exchange for corporate support of charter schools.  I’m attaching a copy. 

By donating land or a building or by funding a major capital project at a school, a corporation can secure 50% of a charter school’s “maximum” enrollment for the children of its employees.  Under the provision for funding capital projects, a corporation can get the enrollment preference by making an investment equal to fifty percent of the parish’s per pupil level of state funding multiplied by the charter’s enrollment.  Per pupil state support in NOLA is around $8,000, so at a school with an enrollment of 200 students, a corporation would need to invest $800,000 in order to secure 100 slots that will be then funded by the state at $8,000 per slot.   To put it another way, a corporation can secure $8,000 in state funding for each child of an employee for the life of the charter school for a one-time investment of $8,000 per student.

In these lean budget times, I understand the desire to pull in corporate dollars for public enterprises.  And I know that the NOLA schools in particular need all the help they can get. But the Louisiana scheme sounds like an awfully good deal to me for corporate children and a bad one for other kids.

As far as we know, no corporation has taken advantage of the new law yet.  But I’m sure the Jindal administration would not have pushed the law through the legislature unless it at least hoped that there would be some takers.

Assessments of Chicago Schools Are Flawed, Report Says

Another result that contradicts state data is a consortium finding of a widening achievement gap, especially during the Duncan administration. Over all, schools in more advantaged areas had stronger gains, while schools in disadvantaged areas tended to show less growth.

September 29, 2011

Assessments of Schools Are Flawed, Report Says

By REBECCA VEVEA

In 20 years of near-constant reform efforts, Chicago’s elementary school students have made few gains, high school students have advanced, and the achievement gap between poor and rich areas has widened, a major University of Chicago study found, contradicting impressions created by years of Chicago Public Schools testing data. 

The report examined performance across three eras of reform over the last two decades — a span including the Argie Johnson, Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan regimes. Researchers for the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that most publicly available data measuring the success of public schools in Chicago did not provide an accurate picture of progress. 

One of the most striking findings is that elementary school scores in general remained mostly stagnant, contrary to visible improvement on state exams reported by the Illinois State Board of Education. The consortium study used a complex statistical analysis of data from each state-administered test over the last 20 years, controlling for changes in the test’s content and how it was scored, said Stuart Luppescu, a lead consortium researcher. 

The report supports the argument made by state superintendents, educators and critics of high-stakes testing who say state exams and the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act do not provide an accurate picture of how schools are doing. 

“There are a lot of decisions being made based on that data,” said Elaine Allensworth one of the report’s lead researchers. “If we’re going to be doing that, we’ve got to make sure we’re looking at the tests in a fair way over time.” 

Last week, the Obama administration addressed those concerns by announcing it would allow states to seek waivers from No Child Left Behind rules. Schools that commit to certain reforms including tying teacher pay and performance could gain exemption from a program that seeks to have 100 percent of students meet basic requirements on math and reading scores — commonly called “cut scores” — by 2014. 

“Just using the cut scores can really give you a false sense of change over time,” Ms. Allensworth said. 

Matt Vanover, a state board spokesman, said the department had not yet received the report and could not comment on its findings. 

Starting with data from 1988, when Secretary of Education William Bennett declared Chicago schools the worst in the nation, researchers divided Chicago school reform into three eras based on policies put into effect by the people who led the public school system. 

The first era is characterized by “decentralization” and runs from 1988 to 1995 when Argie Johnson was superintendent. The second era, labeled ”accountability,” began in 1995, after the state turned the school system over to Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Paul Vallas as chief executive. Era 3, “diversification,” covers the Arne Duncan administration from 2002 to 2009. 

Reports from the state board of education showed that the city’s elementary schools were making significant gains, while high schools remained at a standstill. But consortium researchers found that reading scores at the elementary level remained relatively stagnant, while math scores showed only incremental improvement. High schools showed improvements on state scores, but because the bar for improvement is set higher at that level, those gains are not reflected in publicly reported data.

In a statement, the current schools chief, Jean-Claude Brizard, said the findings illustrated the “immediate and critical challenges” the new administration faces and used the lagging results to continue his push for a longer school day. 

Another result that contradicts state data is a consortium finding of a widening achievement gap, especially during the Duncan administration. Over all, schools in more advantaged areas had stronger gains, while schools in disadvantaged areas tended to show less growth. 

The consortium listed eight schools that showed the most significant progress after adjusting for changes in state tests. Seven were located in affluent areas including Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Forest Glen and Norwood Park. 

“One of the disturbing things is the schools most in need of improvement were the least likely to improve,” Ms. Allensworth said. 

Barbara Kent, the principal at Burley Elementary School, which showed the second-highest gains in the study, said her school revamped the reading curriculum and focused on engaging parents, rather than on test preparation. “Really strong instruction leads to strong test scores,” she said. 

The consortium also said that schools that showed growth were strong in the five pillars they had identified as being crucial to success — instructional leadership, adequate professional support, ambitious instruction, a good learning climate, and strong community and family ties. 

In a recent visit to Chicago, Secretary of Education Duncan weighed in on the current reforms taking place in Chicago, applauding Mayor Rahm Emanuel for his push for a longer school day and praising legislators for passing a law that ties teachers’ tenure to performance. 

Of his own reform efforts, Mr. Duncan told The Chicago News Cooperative: “You build upon the past. By no means did we ever then or now declare mission accomplished.”

rvevea@chicagonewscoop.org

Jamie Fidler of American Teacher on Democracy Now

I am writing to you because I thought you would be interested in a recent Democracy Now! report on the documentary "American Teacher" which opens in select theaters today.

Democracy Now! spoke with Vanessa Roth, the film?s Academy Award-winning director, and with Brooklyn first-grade public school teacher, Jamie Fidler, who is featured in the film. Roth discussed how the film aims to accurately represent the hardships faced by public school teachers. She also criticized the media for maligning teachers despite the great difficulties they face in their profession which are otherwise absent from the discussion about educational reform in mainstream discourse.

When you have a chance, please take a moment to watch the interview and read the transcript. A link for the interview is provided below. I have also provided the embed code if you would like to post the video of the interview on your website or social networking sites today.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

My Best,

Anton Woronczuk
Social Media and Online Outreach Intern
Democracy Now!

----------------------------

?American Teacher": New Film Rebuts Vilification of Underpaid, Dedicated Public School Teachers

LINK:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/30/american_teacher_new_film_rebuts_vilification

DEMOCRACY NOW! VIDEO EMBED CODE:

Unions Begin to Wake Up to Wall Street Protests

NYC Transit Union Joins Occupy Wall Street

First Posted: 9/29/11 12:39 PM ET Updated: 9/29/11 04:56 PM ET

New York City labor unions are preparing to back the unwieldy grassroots band occupying a park in Lower Manhattan, in a move that could mark a significant shift in the tenor of the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street protests and send thousands more people into the streets.

The Transit Workers Union Local 100's executive committee, which oversees the organization of subway and bus workers, voted unanimously Wednesday night to support the protesters. The union claims 38,000 members. A union-backed organizing coalition, which orchestrated a large May 12 march on Wall Street before the protests, is planning a rally on Oct. 5 in explicit support. And SEIU 32BJ, which represents doormen, security guards and maintenance workers, is using its Oct. 12 rally to express solidarity with the Zuccotti Park protesters.

"The call went out over a month ago, before actually the occupancy of Wall Street took place," said 32BJ spokesman Kwame Patterson. Now, he added, "we're all coming under one cause, even though we have our different initiatives."

The protests found their genesis not in any of the established New York social action groups but with a call put out by a Canadian magazine. While other major unions beyond the TWU have yet to officially endorse Occupy Wall Street, more backing could come as early as this week. Both the New York Metro Area Postal Union and SEIU 1199 are considering such moves.

Jackie DiSalvo, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, says a series of public actions aimed at expressing support for labor -- from disrupting a Sotheby's auction on Sept. 22 to attending a postal workers' rally on Tuesday -- have convinced unions that the two groups' struggles are one.

"Labor is up against the wall and they're begging us to help them," said DiSalvo, a retired professor at Baruch College in her late 60s who has emerged as a driving force in the effort to link up labor and the protests. DiSalvo is herself a member of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents teachers at the City University of New York.

Recent anti-labor actions like Scott Walker's in Wisconsin "really shocked the unions and moved them into militant action," DiSalvo said, and the inflammatory video of a NYPD deputy inspector pepper-spraying several protesters on Saturday also generated union sympathy.

"There's a lot of good feeling. They've made a lot of friends," said Chuck Zlatkin of the postal union.

When a band of about 100 protesters showed up at a postal workers' rally featuring Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday, complete with purple hair and big drums, "they went a long way towards touching people and making connections," Zlatkin observed.

If unions move to support the protests in a major way, that could mean thousands more people marching in Lower Manhattan. Thus far the protesters have not managed to come near the 10,000 or so who attended the unrelated May 12 march on Wall Street. The Strong Economy for All Coalition, which receives support from the United Federation of Teachers, the Working Families Party, plus SEIU 32BJ and 1199, previously helped put together that demonstration. Now they will be rallying for the grassroots group.

"Their fight is our fight," director Michael Kink said. "They've chosen the right targets. We also want to see a society where folks other than the top 1 percent have a chance to say how things go."

Asked if the union support could dilute the message of the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- which has itself been dismissed as incoherent -- organizer DiSalvo said the rag tag group's stance would remain unchanged.

"Occupy Wall Street will not negotiate watering down its own message," she said, union support or not.

Corporate Assault on Public Ed

Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty

Publication Date: 2011-09-29

  By Henry A. Giroux  

This is from Truthout, Sept. 27, 2011.

NOTE: This article is based on the preface of Henry A. Giroux's latest book, Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students and Public Education (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education), published by Peter Lang Publishing; First printing edition (July 30, 2011).

Also NOTE: When Brownsville won the Broad prize for best urban district, jurors included Lou Gerstner of IBM, Lawrence Summers, who's done such a good job with advice on the economy, and Rod Paige. On the same day the District won the Broad award, Texas authorities announced that the district had failed to meet achievement targets for two years under the federal No Child Left Behind law. More recently, NBC chose Summers to give the keynote address at its Education Nation event.

Maybe Giroux uses the word "conservative" a tad bit too often. Neo-liberals are our curse.

by Henry A. Giroux


Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatus as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

At the heart of this movement was a culture of cruelty and vulgarity that used education to produce a new form of political illiteracy in which there was no difference between opinions and arguments, reason and emotion and evidence and false statements. In this culture of illiteracy, science became a liability, thinking became an act of stupidity, anti-intellectualism became a virtue, social protections were described as a pathology and the social contract was dismissed as socialism. While social critic Michael Kazin does not mention the notions of education or public pedagogy in a recent New York Times article, he is right in stressing the centrality of education to the current right-wing-Christian-extremists takeover of almost every aspect of political and economic life in America - extending from the Supreme Court to the federal government to the dominant media-cultural educational apparatus. He writes: "Like the left in the early 20th century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to develop and disseminate their ideas. Their think tanks, legal societies, lobbyists, talk radio and best selling manifestos have trained, educated and financed two generations of writers and organizers. Conservative Christian colleges both Protestant and Catholic, provide students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious schools led by liberals. More recently, conservatives marshaled media outlets like Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to their cause."(1)

Education has become the political weapon of choice for conservatives, and they have had astounding success in using the mainstream and new media to drown out the voices of more progressive critics. The evidence is everywhere. For instance, The New York Times is currently advertising its Watch Education Take Center Stage initiative and the keynote address is being given by the politically and morally discredited champion of neoliberal education, Lawrence Summers. Given his failed presidency at Harvard, his utterly shameful role in contributing to the financial crisis of 2008 and the failure of Obama's economic policies and his crude instrumental view of education, why would The New York Times select him as an educational leader and beacon of hope for any kind of educational vision designed to address future generations? Other speakers include the likes of Chester Finn, whose views on public education are as politically reactionary as they are theoretically bogus. Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. Its endorsement of market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public, charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education. Also included are the usual list of charter school, corporate funded anti-union, public school cheerleaders for defunding and privatizing American education. Of course, missing from these dog-and-pony shows are progressive public school reformers such as David Berliner, Stanley Aronowitz, Jonathan Kozol, Marian Wright Edelman, Donaldo Macedo, and others who have been fighting for real educational reform for the last few decades. Nor is there any mention of the many local struggling social movements fighting for public education and the ever-dissolving protections of social contract inherited from the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society programs. Education at all levels is firmly in the hands of the rich, reactionary and the powerful. Is it any wonder given how invisible progressive forces are in this country that young people are not in the streets as they were in the sixties, refusing the future being offered to them by Wall Street and the moralizing Christian fundamentalists?

Of course, this is not merely a debate about education; it is really about the emergence of an anti-reform movement that wants to create armies of low-skilled workers and consumers for the privatized, deregulated and commodified world of the 21st century where a survival of the fittest ethic has been elevated to the status of commonsense. This is a world in which the culture of cruelty is now so commonplace that audiences clap when right-wing politicians insist that people who are terminally ill should die rather than receive government support; it is a world in which the legacies and injustice of slavery and the Jim Crow era now shape a criminal justice system in which capital punishment is largely used to kill black men while, at the same time, used by crass politicians to provoke political support and cheers from audiences who could have once sat in the seats of Roman coliseums watching people eaten by wild animals; the culture of cruelty is now matched by the culture of vulgarity - reality TV shows mimic the worst values of American life; celebrity culture is now so crude that it is worse than illiterate, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian become role models for legitimating a lethal combination of vulgarity and stupidity. The combination of vulgarity and illiteracy permeates American culture, particularly its political class. What is one to make of the current crop of Republic presidential candidates who claim, without irony, that climate change is not the result of human behavior; evolution is bad science; and in the case of the queen of idiocy, Michele Bachmann, ignore the most obvious scientific evidence about the HPV vaccine in order to make false claims about the value of this particular drug in saving the lives of young girls. In all of these examples, education becomes another way of making the larger public and young people either stupid or mindless consumers - even worse, both.

The American public needs access to a new political and educational vocabulary in order to fashion democratically vibrant educational institutions; social movements; community educational centers; bookstores; and a lively, independent press. Young people, educators, activists, artists, parents, and others need alternative media such as Truthout, AlterNet and CounterPunch as popular civic outlets to make education central to building the formative culture that would create new generations of real public intellectuals, youth activists, social movements and a vibrant range of public spheres. I have taken up this issue in my newest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values." The book points to how educators and others can meet the current attack on education, young people and democracy itself. It offers a new vocabulary for better understanding the crisis of education as a crisis of democracy and public life, and provides a number of suggestions for what new beginnings are necessary, all of which is outlined in more detail throughout the book. Below is an excerpt from the preface that forecasts both the swindle of education offered by conservatives, the billionaires and corporate power brokers and why it needs to be resisted with as much urgency and collective power as possible.

With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of times for public and higher education in America; public schools are increasingly viewed as a business and are prized above all for "customer satisfaction," and efficiency while largely judged through the narrow lens of empirical accountability measures. When not functioning as a business or a potentially lucrative for-profit investment, public schools are reduced to containment centers, holding institutions designed to largely punish young people marginalized by race and class. No longer merely tracked into low-achieving classes, poor white, brown and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools have now become stress centers for the privileged and zones of abandonment for the poor. Public school teachers are now viewed as the new "welfare-queens," while academics are defined less as critical intellectuals and engaged scholars than as a new class or professional entrepreneurs. Under strict policies imposed in a number of states by right-wing politicians wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of austerity, higher education at all levels is being radically defunded while simultaneously being transformed into a credentializing factory restructured according to the values, social relations and governing practices of large corporations. In both public and higher education, ignorance is not merely fostered, but embraced through the course content whose value is almost exclusively defined through a metaphysics in which anything that can't be quantified is defined as useless. Corporate pedagogy has no use for critical thinking, autonomous subjects, the stretching of the imagination, or developing a sense of civic responsibility among students. Teachers who think and act reflectively, ask uncomfortable questions, challenge the scripts of official power and promote a search for the truth while encouraging pedagogy as the practice of freedom are now viewed as suspect, if not un-American.

At the same time, amid all of the despair and foolishness on the part of right-wing politicians and conservative and corporate interests, it is not entirely clear that a spring of hope is beyond reach. As I wrote this preface, workers and young people were marching and demonstrating all over the globe against the dictates, values and policies of a market-driven economy that has corrupted politics, pushed democracy to its vanishing point and undermined public values. Unions, public school teachers, higher education, and all of those public spheres necessary to keep civic values alive are being challenged in a way that both baffles and shocks anyone who believes in the ideals and promises of a substantive democracy. In the United States, union-busting politicians such as Govs. Scott Walker (Wisconsin) and Chris Christie (New Jersey) not only want to gut social services and sell them off to the highest bidder, they are also symptomatic of a political fringe movement that wants to destroy the critical culture, dedicated public servants and institutions that give any sense of vitality, substance and hope to public and higher education in the United States.

As the meaning of democracy is betrayed by its transformation into a market society, corporate power and money appear unchecked in their ability to privatize, deregulate and destroy all vestiges of public life. America's military wars abroad are now matched by the war at home; that is, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have found their counterpart in the war against the poor, immigrants, young people, unions, public-sector workers, the welfare state and schoolteachers. The call for shared sacrifices on the part of conservatives and Tea Party extremists becomes code for destroying the social state, preserving and increasing the power of mega-rich corporations and securing the wealth of the top one percent of the population with massive tax breaks while placing the burden of the current global economic meltdown on the shoulders of working people and the poor. Deficit reductions and austerity policies that allegedly address the global economic meltdown caused by the financial hawks running Wall Street now do the real work of stripping teachers of their collective bargaining rights, dismantling programs long associated with social services and relegating young people to mind-deadening schools and a debt-ridden future. David Harvey's notion of "accumulation through dispossession" has become a basic policy of casino capitalism. How else to interpret the right-wing call to tax the poor to subsidize tax breaks for billionaires and mega corporations? Despair, disposability and unnecessary human suffering now engulf large swaths of the American people, often pushing them into situations that are not merely tragic, but life threatening. A survival-of-the-fittest ethic has replaced any reasonable notion of solidarity, social responsibility and compassion for the other. Ideology does not seem to matter any longer as right-wing Republicans have less interest in argument and persuasion than in bullying their alleged enemies with the use of heavy-handed legislation and, when necessary, dire threats, as when Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker threatened to mobilize the National Guard to prevent teachers' unions from protesting their possible loss of bargaining rights and a host of anti-worker proposals.

Obama has joined the Republican Party, leaving us with a Republican Party lite [sic; I think he means Democratic Party lite] and a Republican Party of extremists. We have become a culture of forgetting, obliterating both the legacy of authoritarianism that characterized the Bush-Cheney years, while supporting a new group of Republican politicians who resemble Bush and Cheney on steroids. We are more than a nation in decline; we are a nation moving toward the bittersweet simplisms, policies and values of a new form of authoritarianism. With any viable leadership lacking at the national level, both young people and workers are watching the movements for democracy that are taking place all over the globe, but especially in the volatile Arab nations and in Western European countries such as France, England and Germany. Struggles abroad give Americans a glimpse of what happens when individual solutions to collective problems lose their legitimacy as a central tenet of neoliberal ideology. Massive demonstrations, pitched street battles, nonviolent gatherings, the impressive use of the new media as an alternative political and educational tool and an outburst of long-repressed anger eager for collective action are engulfing many countries across the globe. In smaller numbers, such protests are also taking place in a number of cities around the United States. Many Americans are, once again, invoking democracy, rejecting its association with the empty formality of voting and its disingenuous use to legitimate and justify political systems that produce massive wealth and income inequality. Democracy's promises are laying bare the sordid realities that now speak in its name. Its energy is becoming infectious, and one can only hope that those who believe that education is the foundation of critical agency, politics and democracy itself will be drawn to the task of fighting America's move in the last 30 years to a politically and economically authoritarian system.

At issue here is the need for a new vocabulary, vision and politics that will unleash new democratic movements, institutions and a formative culture capable of imagining a life and society free of the dictates of endless military wars, boundless material waste, extreme inequality, disposable populations and unfounded human suffering. Central to "Education and the Crisis of Public Values" is the belief that no change will come unless education both within and outside of formal schooling is viewed as central to any viable notion of politics. If real reform is going to happen, it has to put in place a viable, critical, formative culture that supports notions of engaged citizenship, civic courage, public values, dissent, democratic modes of governing and a genuine belief in freedom, equality and justice. Ideas matter as do the human beings and institutions that make them count and that includes those intellectuals both in and out of schools who bear the responsibility of providing the conditions for Americans of all ages to be able to think critically so they can act imaginatively - so they can embrace a vision of the good life as a just life, one that extends the values, practices and vision of democracy to everyone.

1. Michael Kazin, "Whatever Happened to the American Left?" New York Times (September 25, 2011), p. SR4.