Category Archives: Rouge Forum Update

Rouge Forum News (Issues 14 & 15): Call for papers.

Rouge Forum News, Issue 14: Call for papers

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 14 of the RF News will be dedicated to papers delivered at the Rouge Forum Conference at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI.

Conference presenters, if you would like your paper to be considered for Issue 14, please send your essay to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu by June 15, 2009.

Rouge Forum News, Issue 15: Call for papers

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 15 will be dedicated to our persistence in providing links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

We are interested in work from academics, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

Something small, something big, something serious. It is the stories we get from people like you that make the RF News what it is. If you have a story to share, but would like to protect your identity, use a pen name. Pen names are ALWAYS welcome!

We NEED Art! Songs! Poems! Editorial cartoons! Links to online videos or other material!

We are looking for narratives, as well as research, and the interplay between research and practice which focuses on the economy, curriculum, unions, etc. If you have a story to tell, some research to share, a book to review, we’d love to see it (and share it).

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools—writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry. You can submit material for the RF News via email (text attachment, if possible) to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu. PLEASE SUBMIT BY AUGUST 15, 2009.

See Issue 13 of the Rouge Forum News. All past issues at available here.

March on Mayday! Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

It is nearly Mayday, the international workers holiday. Since the massive 2006 immigrant rights marches, what amounted to the biggest general strike in the last seventy years, Mayday is finally restored to the US, where it began. For far too many years, it was replaced by Law Day (imposed in the fifties), a day when people were supposed to celebrate the tyranny of property laws.

Now around the US students, kids, workers, educators, community people, and organizers will hit the streets and rally again. School workers can support the kids who are likely to take the lead in walking out of school, joining the many scheduled marches in the struggle for equality and social justice. And we can join them.

The Rouge Forum has celebrated Mayday for the last eleven years. Here is our traditional flyer.

And an update for our current context.

And a link to the music and lyrics of The Internationale.

Hope to see you at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, May 15 to 17.

best
r
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.

Rouge Forum Update: Schools, Economic Crises, Wars and More!

Dear Friends,

Educators attending the Rouge Forum Conference (May 15-17, Ypsilanti, Michigan) can now gain Continuing Education Units for attending conference sessions. Please spread the word.

Thanks to Joe Bishop and the Michigan work group for this big step forward. Links to the current issue of the Rouge Forum News.

This week in the schools:

Sacramento holds segregated assemblies to promote racist high-stakes exams: Laguna Creek Principal Doug Craig said dividing the students by race allowed staff to talk about test scores without making any one ethnic group feel singled out in a negative manner.”Is it racist? I don’t believe it is,” Craig said.

Poway AFT Local Leads Southern California in Making Concessions: Concessions don’t save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more. It should be no surprise that the Poway district is represented by the worst union in the USA, the American Federation of Teachers, but it is of little matter now. The Poway union now sets the table for the rest of SoCal and especially San Diego. Nobody should follow their lead.

Controversial Stanford Study on Big Tests, Girls, and Minorities, by Emily Alpert.

This week on the economy:

Joseph Stiglitz – One of the reasons why our economy is weak is that we have growing inequality in our society. That means that people who would spend the money don’t have it. We sustained their consumption by lending but that lending was unsustainable and so unless we do something about the underlying inequalities both within our countries and across the world, it may be difficult to restore the global economy to the kind of prosperity that we would hope.

Reich: We are not at the beginning of the end.

GM and Chrysler Bankruptcy May End Pensions.

Jackknife: The collapse of the Teamsters Union.

Social Inequality and Mental Health.

This week on wars and resistance:

California Towns Defeat Military Recruiters.

Forget Star Wars, It’s Back to the Little Wars.

Democrats and Rockefeller backed CIA Torture.

With sadness, we note the death of Lindy Blake, courageous mutineer and Vietnam war resister.

“The sky is, of course, falling. We are lambs among wolves. The core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded social and economic inequality challenged by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance.”

Thanks to Amber, Adam, Gina, Wayne, Dave, Kevin, Beau, Vanessa, Cheri, Donna, Kelly, Sarah, Marisol, Ernesto, Candace, Sally, Sandy, Ann, Ruthie, Della, Jose, Greg and Katie, Joe B, Paula, Alfie, Steve R and Rick C, Bill, and Glenn.

See you in Ypsi!

All the best and
good luck to us, every one.

Rouge Forum Update : Upcoming Actions, Current Conditions, Resources, and FUN

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated.

There you will also find links to the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the new Spring Issue of the Rouge Forum News, the only radical education publication in the US. The conference schedule is linked here.

Let’s break this update in parts: Upcoming Action, Current Conditions, and Resources.

Upcoming Actions:

In California and some other states, we are on the brink of test season and, perhaps, boycotts. Opt out of the tests. Tell parents and kids. Walk away. Set up freedom schooling where kids can learn, again, how to learn.

March on Mayday! Mayday, the International Workers’ Holiday, started well over 100 years ago but it was given new life in the US (where the government had declared it “Obedience to Law Day”) three years ago when immigrant rights activists created some of the largest demonstrations in the last 30 years. This year, it is more than likely youths will pour out of schools to join the marches. We should all be on the march, and supporting kids who rightly say that marching on Mayday is more important than the testing drill and kill that goes on in school that day. Here is the Rouge Forum Flyer from last year.

Current Conditions:

You would never know it from the complete silence from the AFL-CIO and NEA on the reality of 650,000 layoffs in the last month, but workers all over the world are fighting back. In Greece, there was a general strike. In France, uprisings sparked by students and teachers, building seizures, bosses kidnapped. In Italy, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the right wing government.
And in Thailand Protestors Smash Rich Folks Meeting.

It is class war. An international war of the rich on the poor with the poor children of each nation fighting poor children of other nations, on behalf of the rich. The core issue of our times is rising color coded inequality vs the potential of mass class conscious resistance.

World Unemployment to Boom in 2009: IL.

Here is Howard Zinn on class in America (video).

States Slash Social Program, but $10.9 trillion went to the banks so far.

DPS to Cut 600 and Close 23 Schools.

The banking crisis deepens as the contradiction between accumulation and consumption sharpens, the banks interested in profits alone and the consumers unable to buy. “Said Frank Pallotta, a former mortgage trader at Morgan Stanley, now a consultant to institutional investors, “if every bank was forced to sell at the market-clearing price, you’d have only five banks left in the market.”

New School Students Seized a Building and the Cops Attacked.

Gutting and Selling the US Manufacturing Base: Quote from the end of the article: Suter was cleaning out a tool shed that might have some resale value to some yuppie who collects such things. He pulled out a bound contract from 2000 between the UAW and The Company. He read from Article V Section 1: “The Union reaffirms its adherence to the principle of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and agrees to use its best efforts toward this end …” “If only everybody would have lived up to their end of the bargain,” he said. And then he tossed the contract in the garbage.

How the “New Labor Movement” Would Mirror GM’s Failed Structure.

The PIRATES! spectacle. We are being lied to again: PIRATES!

The Obamagogue, Torture Enabler, by Ted Rall: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22390.htm

Prove again that you are a good teacher, the New Mexico Model.

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Boom Times for Criminal Syndicates.

Resources:

Political Economy For Beginners.

Meszaros on the Great Financial Crisis.

And a quote worth remembering:

“Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.

Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began–in the ditch of a crisis… The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society… The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations.

It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance… For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour power.”

Frederick Engels’s “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” part of Anti Dühring New York: International Publishers, 1935, pages 64-65

Congratulations to Fred Jerome for his new book: Einstein on Israel and Zionism.

With sadness, the death of Mark Fidrych.

Fun:

The Fox Tea Bag Problem.

Song:

The Internationale, for Mayday.

Thanks to Amber, Joe B and the entire committee for the conference, Adam and Gina, Wayne, Perry, Figora, Donnie A., Milt R, Peter M, Steve R, Ricky C, Sue H, Penny, Dan H, Jim3, Phillip, Gordon, Natalia, Harry K, Kathy K, Jim B, Kim B, Pam R, Tony H, Tommie and Bob, and Nereyda.

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update—Bailouts and the “anti-war” movement

Dear Friends,

For those teaching or learning about the current depression, here are some more good sources:

Lewis Corey’s outstanding 1934 book, Decline of American Capitalism, is online free;
How Goldman Sachs was at the Center of the Oil Trading Fiasco that Bankrupted SemGroup;
The auto crisis, likely leading to the bankruptcy of GM (and the end of retiree health benefits, etc.) but this is also an indicator of the power of finance capital over industrial capital and the shift to the corporate state as US society decays;
Stiglitz on State Capitalism as Robbing Workers;
Updated interview with John Bellamy Foster;
Bello’s Primer on the Economic Meltdown;
The Economist on the Huge Fraud Beneath the Fiscal Crisis: Missing the Deeper Fraud; Exploited Labor
Five Million Jobs Lost So Far This Depression

Current Developments:

Centinela CalfiorniaTeachers Wildcat Strike;
Al Sharpton and the Ruling Class;
Labor Bosses Forge Unity Committee: The plum here is the dues from 3.5 million education workers, members of the National Education Association who will quickly learn that they are funding yet another layer of enemies.

Criticism of “Progressive” Warmongers:

The term “progressive” may have no meaning anymore. If it is Move.on, that means slavish support for the demagogue, Obama. If it is United For Peace and Justice, it means the same thing in shifty terms. UFPJ’s recent Wall Street demos, deliberately set up to counter demands from rank and filers to demonstrate on the anniversary of the war, failed completely. This is nothing to gloat about even though we said, years ago, that following UFPJ would do just this. Still, it is tragic.

Less than 10,000 people demonstrated, down from the one million who hit the streets six years ago. But numbers are not everything. UFPJ trumped that by teaching people nothing at all important about why things are as they are, what to do in order to develop grand strategy (peace, justice, equality, freedom, etc.) or strategy (how to understand specific local circumstances and to seek out choke points where people can use powerful direct action moves) and tactics (particular actions that link these three elements).

Why would that be? Because UFPJ is run by remnants of the Communist Party USA, people who have never sought to build a mass class conscious movement and who have always fought those who try. The current Rouge Forum News has a very fine article by Tom Suber about the wreckage that UFPJ leadership is creating.

Let us be clear. The core issue of our time is accelerating color coded inequality met by the potential of organized mass class conscious resistance. Neither the CP nor UFPJ want any part of that.
Here is a sampling of UFPJ’s failures:

The task at hand is ours. The $10.9 trillion dollars the corporate state just printed for the banks and insurance companies is going to come from the lives and labor of someone. Either it will come from the ruin of hundreds of thousand of poor and working people, or, if we fight back, it can come from the rich. Let them suffer and pay, as they should. The degree of the pain will be determined by the levels of our real resistance in schools, in communities, at work places, and in the military. When they say Cut Back; We should say Fight Back.

This is a critique from Antiwar.com: Progressive Warmongers.

We note with sadness the death of a friend, Janet Jagan.

Thanks to Joe and Charles B., Steve and all the sharp eyes who caught the misspelled word in the last update (argh), Adam, Gina, Greg and Katie, Wayne, Sandra, Colin, Josh and M, Suber (s), the Sally’s, Penny and Rick, Doug and Connie, Betty, Joe C, Susan O and H, Ginny H, Jim S, Ricky C., Chris, Carol Panetta, Sharon A, David, Donnie A, the Breedloves, and the entire RF Steering Committee and folks working on the upcoming conference. http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

All the best and good luck to us, every one.

Rouge Forum News (Issue 13, Spring 2009)

Don’t forget about the upcoming Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17 this year. The program is clearly our best yet with Staughton Lynd as keynoter. Please spread the word.

In the mean time check out the Spring 2009 issue of the Rouge Forum News, edited by Adam Renner.

The RF News is the only clear expression of education radicalism in the US.

Contents

From the editor, Adam Renner
What is the Rouge Forum?
Why do you call it the Rouge Forum?
Blame the Schools, Kevin Vinson and E. Wayne Ross
The Obamagogue and Capital vs. the People, Rich Gibson
Whither the Anti-War Movement?, Tom Suber
UAW in a Route: Secrecy and the Sellout, Bob Apter
Math, Democracy and the Arts, Mindy R. Carter and Mary Ann Chacko
The Illusion of Education, Adam Renner
On Optimism, Cynicism, and Realism, Alan Spector
Why we need to blame ourselves [poem], Michael Simpson
Who will fill the cups? [poem], David Centorbi
Upcoming Events – RF conference, RF blog, RF News #14 and #15 call for papers

Download PDF version of The Rouge Forum News (#13)

Rouge Forum Update, updated

Just a follow up to the Update from yesterday. Joe Bishop pointed out that Lewis Corey’s book, The Decline of American Capitalism, is online.

For those teaching anything to do with today’s financial collapse, Corey’s book, written in the early thirties, is so on point that it is almost breathtaking. Corey, aka, Louis Fraina, was expelled from the CPUSA very early on, on trumped up charges.

Taken together with John Bellamy Foster’s Great Financial Crisis, Marx, and R. Palme Dutt’s, Fascism and Social Revolution, it not only offers a clear look at what happened, but what may come.

Wayne and I took that up at Znet as well.

While other groups are collapsing in this rush to the emergence of fascism, we in the RF are pretty well positioned to make sense of things and to develop strategies and tactics that are reasonable, yet forceful.

Please spread the word about our upcoming conference.

All the best

Rouge Forum Update: Apocalypse Now and Again

Dear Friends,

A reminder of the outstanding Rouge Forum Conference, Education, Empire, Economy and Ethics at the Crossroads, May 15 to 17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at Eastern Michigan U.

This is the only education-based conference in North America that will seriously take up questions of economic collapse, perpetual war, and the booming rise of inequality and irrationalism—and what to do. Keynote speaker, Staughton Lynd, will address the question at hand: What is to be done?

A blast from the past sets up our current condition: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.” Dickens speaking for Micawber in David Copperfield.

The Obamagogue: “But one of the most important lessons to learn from this crisis is that our economy only works if we recognize that we’re all in this together, that we all have responsibilities to each other and to our country.” March 24 2009.

Let us be clear: The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and agenda to mask class war, a war of the rich on the poor which the rich clearly recognize and the poor do not—yet. The most important lesson is we are NOT all in this together.

The core issue of our times is the accelerated rise of color-coded inequality met by the potential of mass class conscious resistance. The promise of perpetual war is every bit as real as it was with Bush. The same bankers who produced this very real economic crisis, collapse, are the bankers of the Obama regime. His transparent demagoguery has not worn out yet, but it may soon as the wars are lost and the economy spins into either deflationary chaos or the almost equally ruinous alternative: rampant inflation.

Here we see firms using bailout money to bribe the political class. Is it hard for liberals to hold up their notion of democracy inside what is now clearly a capitalist democracy, the former overwhelming the latter, while the near seamless merger of the corporations and banks with the political class is finalized? No it is not. Why?

Rolling Stone on “The Wall Street Revolution”.

George Soros Sees No Bottom to World Financial Collapse.

Quotes From the Great Depression—note the parallels.

Here are two pieces on what can happen if class conscious resistance does not begin to materialize:

On the upside, resistance and red flags are flying in France: Academic and student anger grows. The nation’s universities continued to be disrupted by strikes and protests against proposed teacher training reforms last week, while university presidents called for a year’s delay in introducing the changes to allow time for reflection and consultation.

On the downside, because of grotesque misleadership from groups like United For Peace and Justice, the potential of a million people in the streets in the US six years ago opposing the wars, only 5-10,000 turned up on the anniversary this year.

Could sanity be peeping up in this mire of crises in the US ? Some districts are limiting homework.

Wayne Ross and I have a piece under consideration at Z Mag: The Education Agenda is a War Agenda.

Is it not odd that DHS is going right into Mexico? “Through “strategic redeployments,” the Department of Homeland Security plans to send more than 360 officers and agents to the border and into Mexico, Napolitano said. Costs across the board, totaling up to $184 million, will be revenue neutral, funded by realigning from less urgent activities, fund balances, and, in some cases, reprogramming, she said. ”

And is it not odd that troops are going to be sent to the US side of border areas to do police work???????

Two sources to add to John Bellamy Foster’s current book, The Great Financial Crisis, are classics:
Dunayevskaya: Outline of Marx’s Capital. This is a terrific teaching tool.

Lewis Corey’s (aka Louis Fraina) book, The Decline of American Capitalism, written in 1932, arranges an understanding of the present collapse in notable, prescient, detail. Only a very few reasonably priced books are left in print.

The Rouge Forum Blog is up and you are welcome to join it.

And in hopes that this week we can leave ’em laughing:

South Park on the Economy.
SNL: Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford??!!
A modern, roaring, version of L’Internationale.

Thanks to Susan, Perry, Steve, Wayne, Amber, Doug S, Joe B, Kenny, Sherry, Matt, Victoria, Joe C, Adam and Gina, Bob, Victoria, Tommie, Michael, David, Sharon A., Della, Barbara, Faith, Denny, Jim B, Kim B, Gil, Ernesto, Angel, Jackie, Ann, Candy, GF, Peter, Ricky, Steve, Dennis, Kirk, TC, Bob S, John and Mary, Mary and Paul, and to adjuncts everywhere.

Good luck to us, every one.

(more news on those Seattle teachers who resisted testing their students next week)

Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads (conference schedule)

The schedule for the Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads—is now online. Check out the great speakers, sessions and events for the meeting at Eastern Michigan University, May 15-17.

Check out all the details for the conference at RougeForumConference.org

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum Conference, May 15-17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is lining up to be a terrific event. Come meet friends, hear keynoters like Staughton Lynd and get ready for a falling sky. The RF conference link is here.

Please help spread the word about the conference. It looks like our best yet. The lineup of presentations is terrific. You will have a hard time picking which ones you want to attend. The conference will set the north star for education resistance for yet another year. This is our eleventh conference. Time flies.

The Seattle special ed teachers who were suspended for refusing to give their students high-stakes exams that would invariably fail them are back in the classroom and working with a lawyer on their appeal. A note of encouragement would be more than appropriate—solidarity with the notion that an injury to one just goes before an injury to all.
Lenora Stahl.

It was a loud and busy week in education. The One, who we dubbed The Obamagogue, in somewhat good humor, came out in favor of merit pay and a series of regressive educational measures (more regimented curricula, more sophisticated testing) summed up here.

The bosses of the National Education Association (paid upwards of $450,000 a year aside from expense accounts) joined their favorite bedfellows, the US Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of manufactures, to promote, among other things, a national curriculum.

The group hug of business profiteers, labor bosses, and government hacks went on to support what many people feel is the utterly out of date, pre-sky-falling, litany of what’s been called the Tough-Tough Project.

Then Tim Geithner and Arne Duncan went on the road to promote The One’s projects. Here is a report on The Obamagogue’s Liars and Our Future.

Let us be clear. The education budget is a war budget. The core issue of our times is booming color-coded inequality challenged by the potential of rising mass class conscious resistance, in schools and out.

There is continuing debate about the Employee Free Choice Act, now pending before congress and drawing about $200 million in lobbying money—both sides, labor and management combined–in a struggle that may not be exactly about the best interests of workers or the nation, though all the big players say otherwise. Here is a link to the discussion in the Historians Against the War.

There are many demonstrations coming this week around the US and the world. This week marks the sixth year of the US invasion of Iraq, a failed adventure propelled by hubris, oil, regional control, and deception–a mix that could spell tyranny. All who can should be on the march, not only to raise a peace sign, a fist, or a finger, against this travesty, but to test our own strength and resolve.

Remember to spread the word about the conference in Ypsi!.

Want to explain Madoff and a Ponzi scheme to your kids? $9.7 trillion to the banksters and still counting.

Here are some good Great Depression Songs to get us through the week.

Good luck to us every one.

Thanks to Joe B and C, Greg and K, The Bill’s, Bob A and D, Erica, Donna, Shelly, Ann Arbor Ann, Candace, Niki N, Sharon A, Amber, Wayne, Perry, Kev, Curry, M…Y…,Hanna and Cal, Kelly, Elaine, Dominique, Luis, Tanya, Summer, Paul and Mary, Alex and Jeff, Gil G, Kirk, Jimmy B and G, Kathy Young, and Z’s.

All the best,