E Wayne Ross – Page 53 – Critical Theories in Education

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

Rock & Rap Confidential … just exactly why do we need the music industry?

From Rock & Rap Confidential:

JUST EXACTLY WHY DO WE NEED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?… Fred Wilhelms writes: I have a good friend, Jon Newton, who for the past couple years, has graciously provided me, through his website p2pnet.net a place to stand and swing at the evils of the music business. Jon has teamed up with Billy Bragg (who recently engaged in a discussion with Jon on the p2pnet messageboard) to form a2f2a.com (Artist2Fan2Artist) as a place for artists and their fans to discuss issues like filesharing and copyright without having the “industry” get in the way. It’s an effort to define what we all know is the common interest in seeing that artists are compensated by the people willing to support their work, without the middlemen as far as possible. Jon is looking for artists to join in the discussion, which has been extraordinarily civil as these things go, because, up to now, Billy has been holding down the fort by himself (admirably, I must say, even if he remains resistant to the overwhelming logic of my own opinions.) [Fred Wilhelms is an attorney in Nashville]

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

With Olympics Come New Laws to Sweep up Homeless

In an article for October 14th edition of The Tyee, Katie Hyslop describes how four recent Olympic host cities passed laws that criminalize homelessness and links this shameful portion of Olympic history to the Assisting to Shelter Act under consideration by the British Columbia legislature.

Here’s a sampling from past Olympics:

1988 Winter Games, Seoul: 48,000 buildings housing 720,000 people were destroyed between 1982 and 1988 for the purpose of building highrise apartments and commercial buildings;
1996 Summer Games, Atlanta: City officials in Atlanta used a combination of new and old legislation to criminalize homelessness in the city. From 1995 to 1996, over 9,000 homeless people, predominantly African-American men, were arrested for crimes such as sleeping in a park or on the street;
2000 Summer Games, Sydney: The Homebush Bay Operations Act and Regulation passed in 1999 to cover Homebush Bay, the site of the Olympic Village and Park. Police and other officials were given the power to remove people from the area for vague reasons such as causing “annoyance or inconvenience” or using indecent language;
2004 Summer Games, Athens: Law 2730/1999 concerning the planning, development and construction of Olympic works gave the government the power to expropriate land for Olympic use. Anyone living on this land was supposed to be given 24-hour notice to vacate, or face eviction. Houses or businesses on expropriated land were given up to 10 days to vacate the area.

The 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver has produced The Assisting To Shelter Act, which would allow “governments to clear the streets of the poor, homeless and addicted just in time for the tourists and cameras to arrive. The act would give Vancouver police the power to force a person to seek shelter when an extreme weather alert is issued. If there is no room at city shelters, people will be put in a jail cell.”

Of course, the BC government says they’re just concerned about the well-being of people who live on the street. You can read more about the proposed BC law here.

The 2010 Olympic games have prompted a series of laws aimed at undermining the civil liberties in the name of corporate profits and convenience, including bylaws that outlaw signage critical of the Olympics.

Check out the 2010 resistance groups at no2010.com and riot2010.com

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

Matt Taibbi explains why the government is an executive committee of the rich

Now Taibbi doesn’t put it exactly that way, but there is no other conclusion that can be drawn from his fabulously clear explanations and analyses of the global economic meltdown in a trilogy of articles for Rolling Stone.

In “Wall Street’s Naked Swindle” (in the latest Rolling Stone #1089), Taibbi describes how investment banks cannibalized their own kind (Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers) via a counterfeit stock scheme (e.g., naked short-selling). (Taibbi gives a video lesson on short-selling here.)

Taibbi clearly illustrates that “the American capital markets are a crime in progress,” and that “our economy is so completely fucked, the rich are running out of things to steal.” Thus why they are turning on themselves.

He sums things up this way:

The nation’s largest financial players are able to write the rules for own their [sic] businesses and brazenly steal billions under the noses of regulators, and nothing is done about it. A thing so fundamental to civilized society as the integrity of a stock, or a mortgage note, or even a U.S. Treasury bond, can no longer be protected, not even in crisis, and a crime as vulgar and conspicuous as counerfeiting can take place on a systemic level for years without being stopped, even after it begins to affect the modern-day equvialents of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies. What 10 years ago was a cheap stock-fraud scheme for second-rate grifters in Brooklyn has become a major profit center for Wall Street. Our burglar class now rules the national economy. And no one is trying to stop them.

Well, the government is not only not trying to stop them, Taibbi’s own article describes how the U.S. Treasury Department, staffed by ex-Goldman Sachs executives, facilitates the fleecing of the rest of us. Why is this happening…because the U.S. government is an executive committee of the rich.

See Taibbi’s other RS articles on the economy:

The Big Takeover—The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution (RS 1075, March 19, 2009)

Inside The Great American Bubble Machine—Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression (RS July 2, 2009)

The NFL, idiot fascism, and the future of America

The latest issue of Rolling Stone (RS 1089) is highly recommended (even if Bono is hamming it up on the cover). Skip the fawning piece on U2’s current US tour (it’s mainly about their mega-stage and luxury airliners) and read the bits by Matt Taibbi.

The former sports editor for The Moscow Times (Russia not Idaho) gives us a gonzo take on the opening of the NFL season, which includes a report on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium that merits quoting because it is the best paragraph to appear in on a “sports page” in the 21st Century:

Dallas’ opening home game against the Giants, in which their hideously commercialized mall palace known as the new Cowboys Stadium was unveiled to the world, was a genuinely terrifying broadcast event of a kind not seen since the premiere of Triumph of the Will. This was like a debutante ball for America’s new idiot fascism. Still, there was something weirdly compelling about seeing 100,000 Texans cheering historical footnote George W. Bush as they christened what promises to be about 490 years of municipal sales-tax payments, all so that Jerry Jones can see a 160-foot wide image of his own surgery-tightened face on the world’s biggest HDTV. At the home opener, ticket-holders got to see Tony Romo throw three interceptions against the backdrop of multiple corporate billboards lining the field. Then there was the specter of 100,000 people watching a giant taxpayer-funded TV while sitting at the live event. If this is the future, could America be any more fucked?

Taibbi’s writing sits well along side Guy Debord and Raul Vaneigem.

Taibbi also adds this tidbit on the Detroit Lions, biggest losers in the NFL:

If Lions rookie QB Matt Stafford busts, the city of Detroit will collapse under the Earth’s crust, forever, to be spoken of in the future as a mythical lost place, like an Atlantis full of shuttered Ford plants.

The birthplace of the Rouge Forum deserves better but my advice to Bill Blank and the gang is to get outta there.