Category Archives: Rouge Forum Update

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is updated….but the site is shut down as we had so many hits this month, we overloaded the server even earlier than usual.

So, our web page will be up an perking along, opposing the empire’s wars and its efforts to regiment knowledge, on April 1.

Meanwhile, we call attention to the fine work being done by Tom O’Donnell at the University of Michigan. Tom has worked for several years analyzing the role of oil and imperial politics. A Rouge Forum member attended a presentation Tom led recently and asked that we call attention to his work. Some of it is linked here.

We remind Rouge Forum email members that a chat is going on regarding the structure and communications of the RF. How shall we organize ourselves better in order to face the challenges ahead? To join the discussion, write rougeforum@pipeline.com

Remember Mayday is coming soon. Connect with your local immigrant worker rights movement and plan to march on this international holiday for working people.

Finally, we call your attention to a letter written by whole language leader, Ken Goodman, to the Washington Post, about the Reading FIrst non-scandal.

Thanks to Ron, Marc, Kevin, Colleen, Kathryn and TC, Elba, Sherry, Connie and Doug, Susan O and Susan H, Kathy E., and to the organizers of the Chavez Conference in Fresno. It was great!

All the best, r

Published: March 21, 2007
LETTER
In Reading, a Scandal Without Consequences

To the Editor:
It seems that in Washington there are scandals, and then there are scandals. In February, The Washington Post ran a series of articles on the neglect and mistreatment of wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Generals have been fired and heads have rolled. And that’s as it should be.

We’ve now had a series of reports from the U.S. Department of Education’s inspector general on the implementation of the multibillion-dollar Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act. Not one congressional hearing has yet been held. Despite the recommendations of the inspector general’s reports, only one scapegoat has been permitted to resign. No investigations of violations of the law have been initiated by the attorney general. No grand juries have been convened. And the national press and media have virtually ignored the whole scandal.

When Education Week went through the mountain of e-mails released by the Education Department under the Freedom of Information Act (“E-Mails Reveal Federal Reach Over Reading?” Feb. 21, 2007), it found numerous messages that seem to involve conspiracies by Education Department and Nation Institute of Child Health and Human Development functionaries and their paid consultants to violate and misrepresent the law. And yet those very violations were excused by ranking authorities as being necessary to force teachers and administrators to use reading programs and tests
labeled “scientific” by their own authors, with no supporting evidence for the particular programs and tests.

We need to insist that those responsible for mistreating our returning servicemen and -women be punished. And we must also insist that those abusing the children of these returning service people­ and the rest of the children in American schools­also be
punished.

We need to fully air the impact of Reading First, and NCLB as a whole, before the No Child Left Behind Act is reauthorized for another, even more disastrous five years.

Thanks to Education Week for its full reporting of the Reading First scandals.

Kenneth S. Goodman
Professor Emeritus
Department of Language, Reading, and Culture
College of Education
University of Arizona
Tucson, Ariz.

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Endless World War or Commune?

The 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, undertaken for control of the oil fields as well as the geography of the strategic regions of the Middle East and the Caspian Sea, is not just a benchmark of a tragedy, but could be the turning point of a wider invasion, of Iran, and thus World War Three. Russia, China, and other imperial powers must have that oil too. But in the last two centuries, major wars produced revolutions, people’s uprisings. That was true of another anniversary: The 136th Anniversary of the Paris Commune. The Commune remains proof that the choice is community or barbarism, equality and democracy or capital’s perpetual wars.

On March 18th, 1871, the people of Paris revolted against Napoleon III’s corrupt government which had led France to a losing war with Prussia. When the Prussian army neared Paris, Parisian working people realized they had fought a bloody war in the name of the nation but in fact they were fighting like slaves, on the side of their masters. Parisians rebelled. Armed in the name of France, they fought in the name of the working class and beat back both the Prussians and Napoleon. They abolished the standing army, established a peoples’ militia, turned their guns on elites who had misled them into imperial war.

Paris’ workers established a commune, a government on the side of poor and working people, the vast majority. The rich fled to Versailles and began to plot to retake Paris.

The Paris Commune forged a beacon for what could be done if students, workers, and the poor took charge: Commune officials and judges were directly elected with universal suffrage and subject to immediate recall; no commune official would be paid more than the average worker, trade associations were rolled into one big union of all workers; police were abolished and crime evaporated in the face of the armed people; workers from all over the world were welcomed into the internationalist commune; church and state were split and churches turned into schools while state subsidies to mystics were abolished; rent was suspended and factories closed by employers reopened as cooperatives; the Commune revised taxation to compel the rich to pay for the wars only they profited from. The idea of the Commune spread, to Lyon and Marseilles.

But the Commune’s workers underestimated their ruthless wealthy enemies. Communards believed they could hold Paris without attacking Versailles, without seizing the banks. Napoleon III and French ruling elites paid once arch-enemy Prussians to help them retake Paris–deadly proof of the nature of class war. Paris was taken, brutally. After 72 days, in May 1871 the Paris Commune was crushed. Perhaps 100,000 died. But the lessons of the heroic struggle of the Paris Commune serve as life and death lessons today. As we stand in the midst of what appears to be, the Commune shows another way to live.

Today’s deadly imperial rivalries are part of a much broader war, an international war of the rich on the poor, in which each nation’s rich ruling class seeks to use poor and working people to fight and die, not battling their real enemies, but the enemies of their enemies: a class war disguised as national wars. Students, poor, and working people in the US have much more in common with the students, poor, and working people of any nation than we have with Bush/Clinton/Haliburton.

As in 1871, in every nation governments operate not as democratic representatives of the people, but weapons of violence of the rich, executive committees of the ruling classes. In every case, the government, its courts, troops, police, legislative and executive branches, are not neutrals, but enemies of the mass of people who, at best, choose which millionaire will oppress them less in counterfeit elections.

The world is more united than ever before, by systems of production, exchange, communications, and transportation, yet we are falsely divided by nation, race, sex/gender and superstition. But the real division in the world is class, those who own and inherit, the rich, versus the vast majority of people: students, workers, even soldiers. We need to unite across all the false division that divide us, or those divisions will be used to demolish us. We can stand on the shoulders of the workers of the Paris Commune and do more than mourn our current situation, but organize to change it.

The Rouge Forum is an international organization of school workers, students, parents, and community people engaged in education and direct action for equality and democracy. You are welcome to join us.

Join us! The Rouge Forum
www.Rougeforum.org

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People all over the world will be demonstrating against the imperial wars initiated by the combined bi-partisan forces of U.S. elites, specifically against the invasion of Iraq. We should be part of this global movement.

We can, at the same time, look at history to see the choice of community or barbarism in social practice as this is also the anniversary of the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871. The conditions that sparked the seizure of Paris by its poor and working people are somewhat parallel to the conditions we witness today: imperial war and another war, the war on poor and working people in every nation. The people of Paris took action, described in this Rouge Forum Broadside.

The latest RF Broadside might go well as a two sided flyer with the classic Shoot Moneybags, Not People, a Rouge Forum graphic.

Hats off to the rebels of Tacoma, Washington, taking direct action against the war machine as seen here in these videos:

A. Police Response Number One
B. Police Response Number Two
C. Resisters respond to charges of initiating the problem

Those who think beforehand about strategy and tactics in situations like this may be able to better guess what should be done.

D. Arrests at peaceful protest

We will have a full report on the minutes of the Rouge Forum Detroit 2007 conference coming out on Sunday evening, together with a call for a discussion about the suggestions for our organization’s development, that is, our new structure.

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The Rouge Forum web page is updated with initial reports, including great video, from our “Their Wars Left Behind: Education for Action” conference last week in lovely downtown Detroit (where, on Tuesday, Comerica Bank, official name of what was once Tiger Stadium, announced the company was leaving the city).

View photos from the conference here.

Here is a link to some wonderful work from presenters and participants, including song and dance:

At least three things came from the conference.

1. People made lasting friendships, built close personal ties within a community that demonstrated its solidarity in unusual conference fashion—nearly everyone ate together, enjoyed some great films, and made it beyond a Detroit blizzard. Real friendship is radical activity in the USA today.

2. The presentation and keynoters were outstanding, offering new ways to understand and transform the world in schools and out, as you can see from the videos and papers now online.

3. We initiated a transformation of our organization so that new people will be able to come into the Rouge Forum, quickly see where they might best exhibit their talents, and help press forward the project toward equality, democracy, and justice. The minutes from the Sunday organizational meeting will be up this coming week, available for comment on the Rouge Forum discussion list linked here.

In brief, we underlined that justice does indeed demand organization. No other education based group in the US has done what the Rouge Forum has done, or could do with your help.

Thanks to all those who gave generously of time and money, especially Greg Queen and Katy Landless, Amber Goslee, Bill Boyer, Rich Gibson, Faith Wilson, George Schmidt (remember to subscribe to Substance News!), Patrick Shannon, Susan Ohanian, Susan Harman, David Strom, Connie and Doug Lane, M.L, Liebler, Fran Shor, Michael Peterson, Nancy Patterson, Scott Craig, Steve Fleury, Eugenio Basualdo, Joseph Cronin, Steve Strauss, Tim Cashman, Eric Ferris, Ed Sanders, Adam Renner, Gina Stiens, Carolyn Stirling, Peter Werbe, Dave Hill, Richard Kamler, Al Franklin, Mindy Nathan, Sean Ahern, Lloyd Conway, Don Perl, Kristi Roberston, Judy Depew, and Paul Gilmore.

Thanks too to the labor leaders like Al Cholger and Tommie Suber who traveled far to participate, and the Downer Five’s Elizabeth Jaeger, and California Resisters’ Susan Harman, and to the high-school students who did such a fine job taking leadership.

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Dear friends,

Our Rouge Forum “Their Wars Left Behind” Conference, this coming weekend, March 1 to 4, may be the first of its kind in North America. We will unite students, K-12 educators, cultural activists, poets, playwrights, labor activists, in an action-oriented discussion about what to do in schools inside a nation promising perpetual war on the world. The Rouge Forum is the only education-based group in the US that has had the limited courage it takes to make the obvious connections of: Endless War=Rising Inequality=The Regimentation of Schools=Racist High-stakes Standardized Tests.

Check the schedule linked here and come on down to Detroit to participate in understanding, and changing, the world. What you do counts, more than ever before. No one will be turned away for fees.

We will have to leave it to Patrick Shannon, historian of progressive education in the US, as to whether or not our claim of “first time ever,” is true, but it is clear the stakes could not be higher, higher even than a SAT score. What we are addressing now, in every classroom and in every community, is a matter of life and death. Social studies, for example, is no longer about citizenship. It is about killing people.

Among our presenters are Susan Ohanian, author of Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools? and long-time Detroit radio host, Peter Werbe, who will take up the question of the eradication of history in schools, something that would underpin Chalmers Johnson’s claim that, “Americans can no longer connect cause and effect so they wonder, ‘Why do they hate us?'”

So, while this conference will extend the Rouge Forum traditions of friendship, inclusion, and good cheer, it also takes place during yet another pivotal moment in world history: the very real possibility of a US attack on Iran which could easily be the next step toward World War III.

Such an attack will mean harsh repression in the US in order to contain the campuses as well as the poor and working people who will be asked to pay the price of the empire’s wars for oil and social control. Predictably, a key element of both a US assault on Iran, and repression at home, will be racism. One of our tasks will be to put the battle for internationalism, against racism, in the forefront of educational action.

We will show, and discuss, the film, “Sir No Sir,” about the GI led anti-war movement during the wars on Vietnam, and “Grain of Sand,” about the educator led uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our entire agenda is right to the point at hand.

As always, the participants will set the agenda and tone of this Rouge Forum. However, it is clear we need to take up organizational questions (like having a more easily understood leadership group so anyone could look and see where they might display their creativity best), and communications questions (like shall we continue to publish the Rouge Forum News online as well as focus on Substance News’ vital contributions in hard copy?), or matters of outreach (like what shall our role be in professional groups?) and strategic questions (like the one we have taken up for years: how to build a caring community within the RF while, at the same time, we face a ruthless and highly organized opposition?), and perhaps the key question: what do we want people to know, and how do we think they might best learn it?

That implies the big question to each of us: What shall we do? How can we, for example, link direct action vs high-stakes testing with the wars—and freedom schooling?

This weekend in Detroit each of us will have a chance to make a real difference. Please join us, spread the word, and bring friends.

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Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum Conference, March 1-4 in lovely downtown Detroit, will be unlike any other conference this year. We will connect the real links between the empire’s wars, schools, regimented curricula, high stakes testing, segregation and inequality with action-oriented participatory workshops led by some of the most prominent thinkers and activists anywhere. We will draw participants from three continents, five nations. The updated schedule is linked here.
Please circulate widely.

One conference presenter would like to share a room in the Ferry Street Inn, near Wayne State’s campus. Potential roomies please contact me.

Here is a most informative link by Lloyd Conway about why he was prepared to go to Iraq.

Chalmers Johnson speaks about Nemesis.

Several school systems have adopted Joel Andreas’ fine Addicted to War book. Yours could too. Andreas also published The Incredible Rocky, a history of the Rockefeller family.

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Dear Friends,

Our conference bringing together some of the most prominent thinkers and activists in the anti-war, whole schooling, inclusive education, and critical pedagogy movements in North America is set for March 1 to 4. Please note that we need your help in preparing for the conference, especially by circulating the conference agenda to friends and colleagues, and by thinking carefully about just what our social situation is, and what you hope to do about it. Justice demands organization–and you. Nobody will save us but us.

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is fully updated. It is a remarkable collection of key articles related to the empire’s wars, since 2001, of good use to educators and students.

Take note of the Rouge Forum flyer on John Yoo, author of the Bush “Torture Memos,” as well as the effort to illegally wiretap US citizens. The flyer is being well received as John Yoo, fascist, tracks his excuses around California.

Note, too, this article by Pulitzer Prize winning reporters on SAIC, which demonstrates a key thesis put forward by some Rouge Forum members: the government is a weapon, and executive committee, of the rich. Ask, “what would this mean for government schools?”

Chalmers Johnson’s new book, “Nemesis,” is out now, and highly recommended. Here is a link to a piece Johnson wrote for Tomdispatch
.

This link demonstrates the kind of strategic planning we are trying to do in San Diego, with our peace and justice group, which includes a relatively small but active number of educators and students.

I am wondering if other groups are trying to do this kind of work. One thing the local San Diego coalition has achieved is a remarkable drop in high school military recruitment, with a persistent campaign to counter recruiters’ lies, to drive them off high school campuses, and to deny the military warm bodies eager to go off to fight what are really the enemies of their enemies.

Counterpunch recently carried an article, “Cut the Schools-To-War Pipeline” linked here.

best r

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This promises to be a great conference. We have a terrific group made up of some of the most prominent people in the anti-war, inclusive education, and anti-high stakes test movement in North America. In addition, we combine young, middle, and old, people from three continents, k12 educators, profs, students, and community workers.

The Rouge Forum, as you know, is the only organization in the US that has consistently connected the role of capital, race, and social class with imperialism and the resultant demands to regulate what kids know, and how they come to know it, in schools. We have combined research with action.

Our hope is that this interactive, action-oriented conference will not only offer scintillating presentations, but also bring together good minds in order to deepen our collective activity, as an organization. We have set aside a good deal of time to meet people informally. Sunday is a full day of conversations about what is to be done.

We ask that you circulate the full conference schedule to as many people as you can, personally urging them to attend. That kind of one-to-one work is what builds movements.

More information is available at RougeForum.org. Contact rougeforum@pipeline.com or rgibson2@pipeline.com with questions or for additional information.

All the best, r

Our schedule:

The Rouge Forum presents

(National Conference on How to Be Anti-War & Pro-Learning)

THURSDAY, MARCH 1 – SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 2007

Wayne State University, Manoogian Hall (map)

NW corner of Warren & Third Street, Detroit

Thursday Night (3-1-07)

8:00-Bill Boyer and his infamous Ground Zen at the Zeitgeist. Discussion to follow.

Friday (3-2-07)

9:00-9:30…….…
Meet and Greet

9:30- 10:30….….
Susan Ohanian—Author Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Schools? and co-author What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? (Room 91)

10:45-12:00……..
Steve Fleury and Eugenio Basualdo Toward Liberalizing Vocational Education; Joseph Cronin, The Knowledge Based Economy, Educational Debt, and Class Reproduction (Room 43)

Susan Newel- FAME: Finding Alternative to Military Enlistment; Nancy Patterson, Free Speech in the Balance (Room 54)

Scott Craig FLEX Education, (Room 91)

12:00-1:30……… Lunch

1:30-2:45……….
Elizabeth Jaegar, The Downer 5; Susan Harman, (Room 43)

Steve Strauss, Global Transformation of Public Education under Neoliberal Influence ; Tim Cashman, The United States and Its Wars; Mexican Teachers’ Perspective (Room 54)

Rich Gibson Why Have Schools ; Eric Ferris, Social Class: America’s Well Kept Dirty Little Secret (Room 91)

3:00-3:30…….…
George Schmidt, Editor of Substance (Room 91)

3:30-4:00……….
M.L. Liebler Poetry and Music (Room 91)

8:00-Bill Boyer and his infamous Ground Zen at the Zeitgeist. Discussion to follow.

Saturday (3-3-07)

9:00-9:30…….…
Meet and Greet

9:30-10:30……..
Patrick Shannon (Room 91)

10:45-12:00…….
Fran Shor Bush League Spectacles (Room 43)

Adam Renner The Achievement Gap in Mathematics; Carolyn Stirling, Burqas, Bombs and Bleeding Hearts: The Role(s) of Antiracist/Culturally Inclusive Education (Room 54)

Peter Werbe (Room 91)

12:00-1:30……… Lunch

1:30-2:45……….
Dave Hill, Class, Capital and Education in this Neoliberal NeoConservative Period ; Faith Wilson , Downsized Discourse: Classroom Management, Corporate Talk, and the Shaping of Correct Workplace Attitudes (Room 43)

Michael Peterson; Wayne Ross (Room 54)

Nancye McCrary; Richard Kamler Artist as Citizen in Contemporary Society (Room 91)

3:00-3:30…….…
Rich Gibson (Room 91)

3:30-4:00…….…
Alan Franklin, Music (Room 91)

8:00-Bill Boyer and his infamous Ground Zen at the Zeitgeist. Discussion to follow.

Sunday (3-4-07)
What to do? Organizing and proposals for action. (Room to be determined)

Schedule subject to change. See RougeForum.org for any changes.

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Dear Friends,

The promise for perpetual war is quite real. The US cannot leave the Gulf Region, nor the Caucasus, as it cannot abandon the oil, cannot relinquish regional control. Yet the US military cannot defeat the residents of the regions, and cannot understand why. But the US is there to rob the regions of their natural resources, and their labor, and everyone there knows it, if most US citizens do not. So, that fighting will continue. And it will deepen as imperial rivals like the Russians, China, Japan, and Europe witness the weakness of US military and economic might.

The only thing Bush is telling the truth about is that the US ruling classes cannot lose, cannot retreat, in the oil regions. But they cannot win either, so they hope to send working class men and women to fight and die, not fighting against their enemies, but fighting the enemies of their greatest enemies.

The battle over oil is the most serious of battles, as oil independence in the US is simply not possible, and all military machines run on oil.

As the wars progress, we have long argued that fascism will emerge in the US, as it is. Two recent articles, one from the radical press, and one from a prominent Princeton professor, buttress that insight. Here is a link from Richard Falk, Princeton, “Will the Empire Be Fascist?”
and Greg Meyerson, here.

What can educators, students, and parents do in the face of these multiple crises? We can educate and organize to try to build a mass base of class conscious, ethical, resistance, in schools and out. Schools are a key choke point of US society, as elites insistence on NCLB demonstrates. Combined with the military, it is possible that youth in schools and in uniform, could take the lead in mobilizing anti-fascist resistance.

One aspect of that resistance is to build for the mass actions this coming Saturday, demanding that the US GET OUT of IRAQ NOW.

We should demonstrate, not so much to “show ourselves” to politicians, but as a test of our movement, a test of ourselves, our own courage and consciousness, our ability to bring others, to build close personal friendships, and to struggle with one another over our differing analyses of power and change in our communities–so we come away smarter.

We will not change the mind of the executive committee of the rich that is the US government today. But we will learn how far we have come in the process of defeating all of them, and their plan to extinguish hope and reason in the world.

The next step of that process is the Rouge Forum Conference, March 1 to 4, in lovely downtown Detroit, Wayne State University. The full schedule will be released by the conference committee this coming Sunday but, as this is mainly a participatory conference, plan to bring yourself and friends now.

People are already on the move, as people struggle to survive. Street kids recently invaded the World Social Forum and took the food they needed.

And, while school workers remain the most highly unionized people in the US, the percentage of the work force in unions dropped below 12 percent, one-third of the membership peak, perhaps indicating the irrelevance of US union leadership, despite their six figure salaries.

Apologies, again, to AOL users who find many of their Rouge Forum email updates blocked. We have worked with AOL on this problem for one year now, as have many similar list leaders. AOL refuses to assist, and remains, according to Consumer Reports, the worst server in the northern hemisphere. AOL is not only uncooperative and incompetent, their owners were among the first to turn over their members email to the government, on a simple request, when other providers, like Earthlink, refused. We urge you to leave AOL. After all, they do not want you as customers, as they themselves have said. There are many free alternatives, like Sharpreader.

In the meantime, we are troubled we are still blocked by AOL, and seeking hints on how to circumvent them.

Don’t forget, ALL OUT ON SATURDAY. US OUT OF IRAQ. You are welcome to download free posters and flyers from www.rougeforum.org.

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