Labor in the Americas

The June 2005 issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the topic of labor in the Americas.

Most of the articles in this issue are available online:

Labor Movements: Is There Hope? by Fernando E. Gapasin & Michael D. Yates

Crisis in the U.S. Labor Movement: The Roads Not Taken by Elly Leary

Labor Needs a Radical Vision by David Bacon

Canada Labor Today: Partial Successes, Real Challenges” by Barry Brennan

Mexico’s Labor Movement in Transition by Dan La Botz

Made in Venezuela: The Struggle to Reinvent Venezuelan Labor by Jonah Gindin

Paul Buhle also contributes an article titled “The Legacy of the IWW” to this issue, but it is not available online.

Reject the language of white supremacy

From The Black Commentator

In the 33 years since the Gary convention, corporate-speak has become ever more deeply embedded in the national conversation, reflecting the assumptions and aspirations of the very rich, who have vastly increased and concentrated their power over civil society. This alien language saturates the political culture via corporate media of all kinds, insidiously defining the parameters of discussion. Once one becomes entrapped in the value-laden matrix of the enemy’s language, the battle is all but lost. We cannot strategize ourselves out of the racist-corporate coil while ensnared in the enemy’s carefully crafted definitions and points of reference.

Update: NYS agrees for alternative schools to stay “test free”

NYT: State Agrees for 28 Schools to Stay Free of Regents Tests
June 22, 2005

New York State lawmakers and education officials reached a tentative deal yesterday to allow 28 alternative schools to continue to evaluate their students on a portfolio of work, like research papers and science projects, in place of most of the state Regents examinations.The alternative schools, mostly located in New York City and collectively known as the New York Performance Standards Consortium, will maintain an exemption from state tests and be able to use their portfolio assessments through 2010, according to officials involved in brokering the deal.

In 2010, however, the schools would be required to administer the exams unless the Board of Regents approves an alternative. Under the agreement, schools still will be required to administer the Regents exam in English, and the test in math or one other subject to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The deal, which the board is expected to approve next month, will head off legislation already passed by the State Senate to extend the exemption for the consortium schools for four years.

The deal came on the same day that the board announced a multiyear plan to increase the passing grade from 55 to 65 on the five Regents exams required for high school graduation. Under the plan, students entering ninth grade this fall must score at least 65 on two of the exams and 55 on the others.

By the time the Class of 2011 enters ninth grade three years from now, those students will be required to score at least 65 on all five tests to earn a diploma.

The chancellor of the board, Robert M. Bennett and the state Education Commissioner, Richard P. Mills, announced the plan yesterday in Albany.

At a news conference, Dr. Mills sought to portray the increase to 65 as the latest effort to raise standards. He noted that the board postponed the increase two years ago out of concern that too many children would fail to earn diplomas.

“The time has come and the Regents have decided to raise the passing score for graduation in a stepwise fashion,” he said. “This is now clearly within reach.”

But the long phase-in made clear just how difficult it was for state officials to raise the bar for high school students. And in addition to delaying the full application of the tougher graduation requirements, the Regents yesterday adopted an appeals process for students who fail by a slim margin.

As a result, some officials accused the state of diminishing standards. “The state keeps delaying the date because we have failed to prepare students to pass the Regents tests,” said City Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz.

Assemblyman Steven Sanders, chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, praised Regent James R. Tallon Jr. for negotiating a fair compromise. “There should be room for some education programs and assessment that isn’t done in the cookie cutter way,” Mr. Sanders said.

Commissioner Mills did not comment on the deal but said he opposed legislation that would allow an alternative to the exams. Of the schools using portfolios, he said, “If the schools are as good as they claim to be, and I accept those claims, then they ought to be able to pass these exams.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the city teachers’ union, which had supported the alternative schools, said that portfolios in many cases offered as good a measure of students as tests. “We support schools where they have performance assessments that are of equal or greater rigor than the regents,” she said. “And many if not all of these schools do that.”

LARS

dylan_wilson_200.jpg

I thought if anybody could write an entire book about one song and make it interesting it would be Griel Marcus … and he has.

Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads treats the number one song of all time according to Rolling Stone magazine as a sonic event, ushered in by the mother of all drum cracks.

[Note: CBC says “Stairway to Heaven” is the number one rock song of all time, oh well … Mojo magazine didn’t even list LARS among its top 100 protest songs of all time, although Dylan’s “Masters of War” did top the list.]

Unlike most of his previous work, Marcus is not so much in his cultural critique mode as in his nostolgic fan mode. He doesn’t dwell on an analysis of the lyrics or the cultural impact of the song. Instead, this book is about sound and feeling; not unlike Chuck Klosterman’s ode to 80s glam/hair metal Fargo Rock City, if not as funny as Klosterman’s memior.

Along the way Marcus:

    treats us to some fabulous insights from Al Kooper, who wormed his way into organ seat for the recording of LARS;

    provides a sympathetic view of Mike Bloomfield, the unofficial band leader for the recording, and his rapid decline as one his generation’s most talented musicians;

    tells us that David Hendernson, author of Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age has done the best writing on the subject of LARS;

    illustrates the importance of producers Tom Wilson (LARS) and Bob Johnston (everything else on Highway 61 Revisited);

    digresses on the relationship between LARS and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”‘;

    draws a line connecting “Desolation Row”, Vasily Rozanov, and Raoul Vaneigem;

    and emphatically states that “Let it Bleed” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are the two best albums ever made.

The book’s epilogue contains a transcript of rehearal takes for LARS and, as usual for a Marcus book, the notes are as interesting to read as the main text (at least for me).

Toward a color-conscious concept of Marxism

In an article for Left Hook (a radical youth journal based in the US), Rodney Foxworth, an intern at Baltimore’s City Paper takes aim at color-blind Marxism.

…An anti-racist dialogue enables whites to consider their role in the maintenance of a system of rampant inequality founded on racism, specifically white supremacy. This echoes the sentiments of Du Bois and his suggestion that poor whites maintained the institution of slavery; an anti-racist interpretation of Marxism might provide the tools to prevent this reoccurrence. The goal isn’t to offend whites, but to divest them from their “possessive investment in whiteness,” thus allowing for the cross-racial solidarity deemed necessary by activists and theorists.

US Supreme Court to rule on file swapping

Justices to rule on file swapping this week

At issue is a series of lower court decisions that have enraged studio and label executives by saying that file-swapping companies such as Grokster are not legally liable for the widespread piracy that happens on their networks.

At the core of the file-swapping dispute is an interpretation of the 20-year-old decision that made Sony’s Betamax legal to sell in the United States. Much of the subsequent consumer electronics industry has been built with that decision in mind, and now companies are worried that it’s open for review.

In 1982, testifying in front of Congress before the Supreme Court had ruled, MPAA President Jack Valenti said, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Hmmm…sounds like BS to me…

That’s bullshit!

IMHO the best book of the summer is Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit.

This book is essential reading if you watch television “news,” work in a university, or just happen to be alive in the 21st Century.

Frankfurt attempts to build a theory of bullshit that distinguishes it from “humbug” and “lying”. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.

In the end, Frankfurt muddies the water as to whether George W. Bush is merely a liar or bullshitter–but for Frankfurt a bullshitter is a more insidious threat to the truth than a liar is.

Either way it’s obvious that the majority of Americans are in need of reading this book.

Are bullshiitters more reprehensible than liars? A short video interview with Harry G. Frankfurt.

Criminalizing childhood?

In response to the increased use of “antisocial behaviorial orders” against children, The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, said this month that Britain’s policy on antisocial behaviour was criminalising children. He said no juvenile under 16 should be at risk of imprisonment for breaching an antisocial behaviour order. Asbos should be “restricted to serious cases”.

Civil liberties groups have raised concerns that local authorities are using the powers of the orders as a short cut to imposing criminal punishments. An Asbo [antisocial behavior order] is granted as a civil power, but a breach of the order is treated as an offence punishable by up to five years in prison, or a young offenders’ institution.

The wide terms of the legislation mean that a magistrate can grant an Asbo by being satisfied only on a balance of probabilities that the accused’s behaviour is “likely to cause alarm, harassment or distress”.

Groups such as the British Institute for Brain Injured Children, a charity working with young people with behavioural difficulties, say that the Government’s targeting of “families from hell” could lead to the demonising of children with Asperger’s syndrome or other problems.

In the first year of the Asbo, 1999, only a few dozen applications were made to the courts. Since then, Labour has introduced laws to strengthen their use while giving councils and police more money to fund applications. In many cases, an Asbo against a child is now accompanied by a naming and shaming order.

The Children’s Society has said that it is “very concerned about the Government policy to “name and shame” children who receive Asbos. Liz Lovell, a policy adviser at the society, said: “The policy is not only counter-productive, it puts children and young people at risk. We are also opposed to the proposed extension of this policy in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill. ‘

Full story available here

NYS alternative schools under attack

In The New York Times, Michael Winerip reports on the latest efforts of New York State Education Department to destroy alternative schools via the imposition of mandatory graduation tests.

Students in New York must pass five exams to graduate from high school. In the mid-1990s, former state education commissioner Thomas Sobel granted 28 alternative schools (serving 16,000 students) an exemption from most state tests that permitted more innovative curriculum and teaching.

Current NYS Education Commissioner, Rick Mills believes that all students, without exception, should take every test. Mills has turned New York’s public schools into one of the most test-driven systems in the US.

Mills has been battling the alternative schools–now organized as the New York Performance Standards Consortium–for years and may have the upper hand as the exemptions handed out by Sobel are set to expired.

Consortium schools now have the backing of the chairmen of the education committees in both the State Assembly and the Senate Education, so the stage is set for what might be test of Mills’ draconian rule as the biggest test-pusher this side of George W. Bush.

For more on the NY Performance Standards Consortium see: resisting the tyranny of tests.

Why the Downing Street memo matters

TomDipatch.com presents a through overview of the importance of the Downing Street memo and the gutless US media’s failure to cover the story.

Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press — no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn’t go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn’t add up to much! because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn.

This issue of TomDispatch also has an exchnage between reporter John Walcott and Mark Danner, author of the The New York Review of Books article “The Secret Way to War.”