Category Archives: Rouge Forum Update

Rouge Forum Update: Great Depression Halloween Special: Boo!

Below are some some links from the most recent RF Update, read the full update here.

The core issue of our time: The real promise of perpetual war and rising inequality met by the potential of a mass class conscious movement for equality and justice.

Smile of the Week:
Student asks his principal, “Where is my teacher?”.
“Citywide layoffs”, replies the principal.
“My text books?” asks the student.
“State austerity plan”, says the principal.
“Student loan?” continues the student.
“Federal budget cuts”, says the principal.
Finally, exasperated, student asks, “But how am I going to get an education?”.
To which the equally exasperated principal replies, “This is your education”.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and the War Agenda is an Education Agenda Featurette:

Duncan Flunked Chicago School Closing Project: “This report reveals that eight in 10 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students displaced by school closings transferred to schools ranking in the bottom half of system schools on standardized tests. However, because most displaced students transferred from one low-performing school to another, the move did not, on average, significantly affect student achievement.”

Hey Kids, Photograph that Recruiter

DFT Praises Extension Of Broad’s Bobb Contract

Detroit: An Individual and Collective Wrong–Award Winning Counselor Mr Z has to Go

NEA Loses NCLB Suit; How Many Hundreds of Thousands of Your Dues $s did NEA Waste?
“Depending on whom you ask, the No Left Child Behind Act might be described in many ways: bold, ground-breaking, noble, naïve, oppressive, all of the above and more,” Judge Sutton wrote. ” But one thing it is not is ambiguous, at least when it comes to the central tradeoff presented to the states: accepting flexibility to spend significant federal funds in return for (largely) unforgiving responsibility to make progress in using them.” NEA will do anything, like courts and ballots, to avoid educator/student alliances to control work places and communities, as those actions would make NEA as irrelevant as it already is.

NEA Bosses Escalated Their Once-Secret Effort to Boost Their Salaries and Merge With the Worst Union in the USA, the AFT and AFL-CIO, When NEA Prez Dennis Van Roekel Directed Key Committees to Revisit the Issue. This is what one researcher rightfully concluded about what would happen some time ago:

And this is what happened last time NEA tried the merger scheme

DPS Lost Millions on Corrupt Land Deals

$30+ Million Detroit Public School Fraud and Growing Every Day

Smashing Protest at Southwestern College, San Diego

Public Universities Gut Student Life, Charge More: “The stimulus isn’t a bridge; it’s a short pier…This fall, flagships still had to cut costs and raise tuition, most by 6.5 percent or more. And virtually all of the nation’s top public universities are likely to push through large increases in coming years.”..“The students are at a point of rebellion, because they’re paying more and getting less,” Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. At U.C.L.A., class size has increased by 20 percent over three years ..Today, UM is largely protected from Michigan’s plummeting economy. Only 7 percent of its budget is provided by the state.

Rouge Forum Update: Educate, Agitate, Occupy, Escalate!

Read the full version of the latest Rouge Forum update here.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and the War Agenda is an Education Agenda

Sit-in Against Cuts at Fresno State: “Failure to comply with these demands will be met by increased levels of activism by students.”

Camp-In at CSU Fullerton

Solidarity Alliance at Berkeley Calls for Three Day Action: “To this end we call upon the allied students, workers, and faculty to unite in a system-wide Three Day Solidarity Strike from November 18th to November 20th. We invite all members of the UC community in Northern California to converge on the Berkeley campus to Strike beginning with a mass rally on November 18th and a mass action on November 20th to call for escalation and continued struggle.”

Southwestern College (South San Diego County) Profs Suspended for Protest vs Cuts

Regimented Standards Set Stage for National Tests: “As 48 states charge ahead with plans to adopt common academic standards, the U.S. Department of Education will enlist experts and the public to help design a $350 million competition for the next step: the development of common tests.”

An “Atta Boy, Obama” from Jeb Bush on the Education/War Agenda

Sweetwater Teachers Resist CTA Sellout in CA

Chickens Come Home to Roost with the Chickens in Teacher Ed: Arne Duncan Speech on Teacher Education Programs: “they say two things about their training in ed school. First, most of them say they did not get the hands-on practical teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students. And second, they say there were not taught how to use data to differentiate and improve instruction and boost student learning. On Tuesday night, at a national town hall meeting with teachers, I asked the studio audience of about 100 teachers how they felt about their schools of ed. An uneasy laughter filled the roomnot the kind of response that engenders confidence.”

Ban Maya Angelou! But we know why the caged bird builds its own cage.

Surprise. Weekly Reader Lies About Socialist Helen Keller

Rouge Forum Update: John Brown Memorial Special

Below are some links and commentary from the latest Rouge Forum Update.

Read the full update here.

October 16/17, is the 150th Anniversary of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry. Brown knew that the very definition of racism was sharpening (the notion of a separate species) and that slavery sought new territory as well. He knew slavery and exploitation are violent, and profitable, slavery being the cornerstone of industrial capital. And he knew the Masters do not adopt the ethics of the slaves. From his last speech, “Had I interfered in the manner which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved (for I admire the truthfulness and candor of the greater portion of the witnesses who have testified in this case), had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.”

Action and Reaction in the Schools

The Second Occupation at UCSC Ends With Police Attack 10/15

October 24 UC Berkeley Meeting Notice

UPTE Calls for General Strike: The following resolution calling for direct actions up to / including ageneral strike of public education workers was passed overwhelmingly earlier today by the statewide convention of University Professional and Technical Workers (UPTE / CWA). UPTE is the union that called a one-day strike on September 24, one of the key events in the September 24 day of action at UC Berkeley. OEA’s Rep Council passed a similar motion on October 6. [UPTE represents 12,000 research, technical and health workers at the University of California.

“Therefore be it resolved that we work in concert with other public sector unions, students and community members to organize a unified response that could include a general strike, a walkout from classes and other direct actions.”

Blackwater Ousted at Southwestern College After 2 Year Fightback: “CHULA VISTA, CA (Oct. 16) – Southwestern College District Governing Board approved the cancellation of their agreement with Blackwater-Xe in their October 14, 2009 board meeting. The agreement had students from Southwestern College enrolled in law enforcement training programs using shooting ranges in the Blackwater-Xe Otay Mesa mercenary training facility.”

Gropenfuhrer Signs Ca. Merit Pay Bill

AFT Lines Up For Merit Pay at Obama’s Trough: “Education reformers were pleasantly stunned when the American Federation of Teachers announced today that two of the winners of their new Innovation Fund grants planned to use the money to create teacher-evaluation systems that give weight to students’ standardized test scores.”

D.C. Rhee Fires 400 School Workers, AFT gives a Speech

What of NEA With 3.5 Million Members? NEA Prezzie Dennis Van Roekel addressed the recent AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh where the narcissist Richard Trumka was anointed President of the corrupt Federation. NEA’s bosses have been trying to work a secret merger pact with the AFL-CIO for twenty years. It would add a lot to their salaries, and add another layer of enemies to NEA members. Then Van Roekel traveled on Air Force Two with Arne Duncan, Joe Biden, to Syracuse, to tout education “reform.”
What to do with this “unionism?”

Army Wants to Recruit in Middle School: “Wichita’s program uses a military structure to teach civics lessons…“The Army’s got a lot deeper pockets than education,” he said.”

Rothstein on NCLB Reauthorization: “The Obama administration’s ESEA re-authorization proposal should reject the continued punishment of schools based on flawed standardized tests, and instead focus on the careful and cautious design of new forms of qualitative evaluation.”

Conservative Think Tank, “NCLB has not worked the way it was intended and the nation is worse off because of it.”

NY Times Charts Show Failure of NCLB

Detroit Public Schools Broad Foundation Boss Payouts to Consultants

Rouge Forum Update: Punished by premature rewards?

The full version of the latest Rouge Forum Update is here.

Here are some of the links from the Update:

In the Little Rouge Schoolhouse:

Rampant Fraud in Detroit PS Amazes Boss

Broad Appointee to Spend $40 mil on Detroit Consultants

Ohanian Comments on the DPS Consultant Rip-off

Marc Bousquet Interviews the UCSC Occupiers

NEA to Abandon Seniority Rules on Staffing?

No Volunteer Left in Taylorized School

What Would Alfie Say About the Nobel Award?

War, War, War But What is the Plan? Who is the Enemy? What is Winning? Don’t Dither!

Taliban Raids Pakistan’s HQ

Honduran Coup Continues Crackdown

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kissinger (Surprise) Calls For More War, Done Better

Danger of Delay in Afghanistan by the CFR and CIA

An Oldie But Goodie From Country Joe in honor of those young people sitting in the mud in Afghanistan, wondering what their ruling class plans for them, what the strategy is, who the enemy will be and what tactics will be used next (and can we trust that our officers care?)

Money, Profits, Losses, Fear, Greed: The Economy

Wall Street Journal on the Weakening Dollar, Down 25% Since 2000

What does a Trillion Dollars Look Like? Wait! What Does 12.9 Trillion Dollars Look Like?

100th Bank Failure of 2009 Coming to Your Hometown? “Mr. Cassidy projects that as many as 1,000 small banks will close over the next few years…Together, the 8,176 smallest banks control just 15 percent of the industry’s $13.3 trillion in assets.”

Welfare, the Real Minimum Wage, Under Attack Again

Goldman/Government Sachs to Reap another $ Billion

More Education and Resistance:

North American Labor History Conference, Detroit, October 24 to 26

Pittsburgh G20 Protests and the Coppers

Rouge Forum Update: The Resistance Rises. Up the Rebels!

Think Outside the Testing Bubble (by Bryan Reinholdt)

Rouge Forum Update: The Resistance Rises. Up the Rebels!

Dear Friends,

Our Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page (complete with those good for the rest of your life anti-war posters on sale) is updated at www.rougeforum.org

Reality is catching up with our analysis. Direct action takes the place of a single-tactic electoral outlook. The term, “capitalism,” is revived and post-modernism, that loud religion with an angry cloak, becomes a tidbit of history. The core issue of our time is the terrible reality of endless wars and inequality met by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance.

The Resistance Rises. Up the Rebels!

“Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.”

UC Walkout
Media solidarity
Bousquet Interviews the Sitdowners at UCSC
Video on MORE

Read the rest of the RF Update here.

Rouge Forum Update—Campuses Rising

You’ll see a remarkable shift in the level of resistance in the US, still trailing well behind the rest of the world, but resistance rising nevertheless. At issue: Whether people will make real sense of why things are as they are.

Rouge Forum Update (Sept 27, 2009)

Now, D.C. teachers have recognized the corrupt reality of their union and targeted its boss, as well as their top boss, Michelle Rhee.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092404304.html

Good luck to us, every one.

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

We are working on the updates, seeking to make them easier for all to see and less intrusive.

The main issue this week is the system-wide walkout on September 24. http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=6

Down the road, we need to consider what is next. One thing is clearly next, the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, October 16, 1859.

Good luck to us, every one.

Rouge Forum Update—UC walkout, Grenanda 17, unions and more

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

The main thing in the brief period ahead: Spreading the September 24 University of California walkout to campuses of all kinds, all over.

We need to do all we can to spread the UC walkout which so far, has not linked the massive attacks on the UC system to the wars and bankster bailouts.

From what I hear back, other than at Berkeley, the sponsors of the walkout are worried about turnout in the UC system as a whole. It may well be that more students will walk out than profs, which would be ok, even fine if the campuses are shut down.

Since the UC profs called for this, it is going to be used as a measure of what all kinds of resisters can do, by all sides. We have a big stake in trying to make this succeed.

Besides, schools closed by strikes or civil strife, matched by some kind of freedom school where people actually discuss why things are as they are, are much better than open schools.

Why is the UC system, with help of AAUP, able to have this walkout while the huge CSU system just sits still, after taking even more egregious hits than the UC?

Because the UC tenured profs have no union contract.

The CFA/NEA which represents the CSU has a bargained contract–sold out as it may be. That contract includes a no-strike clause, the traditional union trade-off for guaranteed dues collection, the check-off. That contract means the CFA union bosses are duty bound to halt official strikes for the duration of the contract. That is, unless they are real unionists in the best sense of the word, and that they are not. The practice of the union as a bank rules over the idea of the union as an agent of direct action solidarity. In other words, union has not meant union for many years.

Of course, one might ask just what kind of a union is that? And the answer would be, just like all the rest of them—corrupt to the core. That is what every major union in the US does.

Now, to be fair, the UC lecturers are represented by AFT. They did not have to take some of the cuts that the tenured profs did, but they started out in a deep hole anyway. To go further, the reason the UC profs do not have a union is not because of their leftist critiques.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda. That connection needs to be made in the walkout. It is not made now, not in the formal publications I have seen.

The likely to be $3 trillion plus wars are part of the reason the education system is under attack at every level. Another is the $12.9 trillion given to finance capital, no strings attached, and the untold billions given to industrial capital which continued to dump workers. But the president of GM was fired, finalizing the move to the corporate state behind the demagogue, Obama.

20,000 teachers lost their jobs in California this year, and every school just got notified of another $900 per child cut—as well as further structural cuts that are, right now, hard to add up.

There is a direct line: regimented curricula=high stakes exams= militarization=merit pay=perpetual war. And the other way around too. Maybe someone can make a graphic of that logic.

One Million Homeless Kids Hit the Schools

Stim Money Does Not Stop Massive School Cuts California Lays Off 20,000 teachers. What does CTA do? Nothing.

Oakland University in Michigan went on strike for two weeks. The strike is over now. Note that they are represented by AAUP, far less likely to destroy a strike from within than NEA or AFT.

Suggested video: Judgement Day, Intelligent Design on Trial—With this episode, the popular “Nova” series examines the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a controversial legal battle sparked by a group of science teachers who refused to comply with an order to teach intelligent design. Through scene re-creations, interviews and expert testimony, the program presents the arguments of both sides and illuminates the conflict that thrust the people of Dover into the worldwide spotlight.

Class comment of the week from a Marine Afghan war vet, “I had a choice, either dealing drugs and killing people in a street gang or the Marines and Afghanistan.” The real choice is community or barbarism.

Banksters, Industrialist, and Their Economy:

Daniel Yergin: Why Oil has a Future

Baker: Reverse Bank Robbery

Americans are Poorer and It’s Going to be Worse

How Did Bernie Steal $50 Billion? Thank the SEC

One More Time on the Terror Wars:

US Terror Bomb Kills 70 Afghan Civilians

TomDispatch: Measuring the Terror Wars, Afghanistan by the Numbers

Free at Last!

The last seven of the Grenada 17 were released from prison on Saturday, September 5. While in prison, they set up an education program that competed favorably with the nation’s best schools.
Photos here.

And Wither the Unions?

AFL-CIO Boss Abandons EFCA as the bankrupt body meets in Pittsburgh as they prepare to give up on single payer. Maybe a refund from Obama?

Thanks to Adam and Gina, Tony H., Bob (happy release from the hospital and speedy recovery), Joe L, The Susans, Donna, Kate, Sue H, Sandy H, Kim B. Good luck in BC to OR and I. More thanks to Wayne and Abraham, George, Jack G., Don A, David R, Kenny and Cheri, Mark, Sheila, Bryan, the newly forming RF Steering Committee, Amber and the gang of courageous teachers.

Good luck to us, every one.

Rouge Forum Update–The Phony Labor Day

Dear Friends,

http://richgibson.com/RFupdate090709.html

This week’s update got a little long but there are bullet headlines and notes on current job actions (Oakland U strike, UC strike, etc) early in this link, followed by a continuation of the discussion of Education vs Capital, why that is and what to do.

Our friend Susan H got arrested in Seattle (not guilty as charged) for protesting the Torture Memos that came out of John Yoo and the Bush administration, the ones that Obama would like to sweep away. So, You Go Susan!

Steering committee members will be contacted this week.

Here is a link and good luck to us, every one.
r