E Wayne Ross – Page 69 – Critical Theories in Education

Rouge Forum Update

Dear Friends,

Restored to life!

Welcome back to school and the Rouge Forum. Our web page is fully updated.

Our Steering Committee will meet in Detroit on the weekend of September 27, setting our agenda for the coming year. If you would like to attend or add agenda items, please let me know.

Rouge Forum members will help lead teach-ins about schools and the war around the US this fall. Information is on our web site.

Some items of interest from the summer:

Let us remember that both Obama and McCain insist they support merit pay as does Democrat George Miller and Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, the Democratic delegation at their recent Denver convention routinely showed contempt for leaders of the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, together representing the largest bloc on the convention floor, NEA alone with 210 delegates. The unions both endorsed Obama nevertheless and will pour millions of dollars into the current election spectacle, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours. NEA, in addition, proudly claims a million Republican members, of 3.2 million nationwide.

Why would NEA and AFT executives endorse politicians who attempt to enforce merit pay, a vital choke point for those who seek to sort children, educators, and knowledge itself, by class and race? The usual official argument is, “lesser of two evils.” The reality is that presidents of both NEA and AFT earn well over $450,000 a year. That alone means they do not live like school workers, do not shop where we shop, do not work where we work, do not witness our struggles and, since they have lived like this for more than a decade, their viewpoint is from the other side.

Worse still is the fact that of the ten executive officers of NEA (including the top executive, John Wilson), only two are from states that have collective bargaining in the law, meaning eight never could have bargained a contract, and the two remaining never bargained a contract anyway, and none of them has ever directly managed a strike—the most important weapon educators have. The memory of how to resist, from officialdom, is nearly gone.

Both NEA and AFT actively supported the development of NCLB, working in tandem with the US Chambers of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Broad Foundation and others. Executives of both unions, from time to time, hint about problems with NCLB, its high stakes exams and regulated curricula, but the union bosses actually attack those who try to do something about NCLB—like Susan Ohanian—and they never opposed the military invasion of schooling that is an important part of the law.

UTLA, the largest school worker union in California, still insists it will back merit pay on “a cold day in hell,” according to a past president. But the coming trends, and the war-based budget collapse, show that educators have a fight ahead—for pay, benefits, and the freedom to teach well and the very lives of kids who, this year, arrive homeless, foreclosed. Bankers, though, get bipartisan bailouts.

San Diego’s Education Association fought massive layoffs for 9 months. Still 194 teachers are laid off and the superintendent, Terry Grier, continues to insist on injecting merit pay into contract negotiations.

Denver teachers in the American Federation of Teachers will likely ratify a contract that extends their existing merit pay program.

In collapsing Detroit, dozens of schools will be closed and hundreds of school workers laid off. The district’s new superintendent, Connie Calloway who previously administered a district smaller than 5,000 kids, just discovered a $408 million dollar deficit.

Calloway also discovered thousands of textbooks sitting unopened in a warehouse, new from last year, full of mold, never delivered. The Detroit Federation of Teachers President, Virginia Cantrell, suspended the Executive Vice President, Greg Johnson, for insisting that educators need, “books, supplies, lower class size,” at a union rally where Cantrell gave the podium to superintendent Calloway to make a pitch for concessions.

Washington DC teachers, though divided, will likely endorse a merit pay program introduced by Teach for America grad, Michell Rhee, a favorite of NPR and PBS. The VP of the DC local is currently suing the president.

We should remember this quote about NPR from William Blum, author of Killing Hope:

“The president of NPR, incidentally, is a gentleman named Kevin Klose. Previously he helped coordinate all US-funded international broadcasting: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Central Europe and the Soviet Union), Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Marti (Cuba), Worldnet Television (Africa and elsewhere); all created specifically to disseminate world news to a target audience through the prism of US foreign policy beliefs and goals. He also served as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Would it be unfair to say that Americans then became his newest target audience? All unconscious of course; that’s what makes the mass media so effective; they really believe in their own objectivity. Not to mention the conscious propaganda.”

Note, though, that the former DC teachers union president and other officers are in prison for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dues dollars.

New York City teachers endorsed an expanded merit pay system over the summer.

Miami Dade teachers went back to work with a contract but the district refused to pay the negotiated raise. The union, whose past president of twenty plus years, Pat Tornillo, was convicted and jailed for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dues dollars, urged the teachers to sign a petition, and work.

The Chicago Teachers Union, AFT, continues to sport a merit pay project initiated by a federal grant in 2006. CTU’s President also suspended it’s Vice President for dissent.

Six years ago, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers resoundingly defeated a move to continue a merit pay system in their schools that had, in their experience, failed. AFT presses on with one sellout after the next. Later, AFT leaders in Cincinnati wheedled a contract that has teachers evaluating teachers for merit pay, a high point of educators becoming instruments of their own oppression.

Clearly, the urban American Federation of Teachers leads the charge toward merit pay, as they have led nearly every retreat of the labor movement since Al Shanker declared in 1975 that he stood for the unity of union bosses, superintendents, business, and government, “in the national interest.” Shanker began concession bargaining, never learning that making concessions is like giving blood to sharks—they only want more.

AFTs’ betrayals of its own members are, as we see in San Diego, going to appear on NEA bargaining tables everywhere. Given NEA’s history, and their adoption of Shanker’s collaborative outlook, it is quite possible that absent rank and file action, merit pay based on test scores will appear in NEA contracts nationwide. Then, educator pay and benefits will reflect the income of the parents of the kids in the classroom. This will materially divide the work force even more, weakening solidarity, making it easier still to manipulate education in the interest of war and inequality.

A 2007 study by a University of Florida Economics professor, David Figlio, now seeks attention as academic proof that teacher merit pay improves student test scores, a fetish among politicians, NPR, Ed Week, and many people in the public. What goes unnoticed by many educators is that about 16 percent of US schools are already working with merit pay.

With Governor Swarzenegger declaring a $4.8 billion dollar budget deficit and the budget long overdue, given our current social context of an international war of the rich on the poor, inter-imperialist warfare (costing the US taxpayers $3 Trillion), the collapsing banks (Bear Stearns bailed out), the mortgage crisis (Fannie and Freddie Mac bailed out to the cost of untold trillions)—i.e., the use of government to privatize profits and socialize loss, using the state as an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich—school workers (parents and kids) can expect fights ahead on many fronts.

At issue is whether or not we wisely hunt down the root source of our problems, from inflation to layoffs to health care and pay cuts, to merit pay to pension cuts and rising class size, and the systematic attacks on our kids through regimented curricula promoting little more than technical expertise and witless nationalism, high-stakes racist exams, and the militarization of working class schools: will we see these problems have common beginnings and fight together, parents, students and kids; or will we allow ourselves to be picked off one by one—as is happening with thousands of wrongly foreclosed families right now?

What is the source of our problems? The system of capital, its wars, and the class war we find ourselves in today. Should we miss that reality, or believe we can vote ourselves out of it when both the Democrats and Republicans have conducted open, bipartisan war on the schools through the NCLB–as well as promising endless war on the world–if we fail to see that nobody is going to save us but us, we are in for dark days in education, and the very struggle for reason.

We have mounted a resistance based on direct action and an ethic of equality that says, “you are what you do,” for more than a decade through Substance News, The Rouge Forum ( www.rougeforum.org ), Susan Ohanian’s web site, and Calcare on the Resist list. Please spread the word.

There is always hope in kids.

All the best for a good school year.

r
ps: Here is an early look at a piece in the October Substance

Take a look at the newly designed Substance web site at
www.substancenews.net and please, please subscribe to the hard copy version or send a donation to the only print source of education activism in the US.

File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA Litigation

Image from modernhumorist.com

From Wired.com via RockRap.com:

File Sharing Lawsuits at a Crossroads, After 5 Years of RIAA Litigation

By David Kravets September 04, 2008 | 5:55:39 PM from wired.com

RIAA attorney Donald Verrilli Jr. says file sharers are automatically liable for copyright infringement and monetary damages for using peer-to-peer networks. Casey Lentz is trying to settle her RIAA lawsuit. She says the RIAA is “harassing” her.
It was five years ago Monday the Recording Industry Association of America began its massive litigation campaign that now includes more than 30,000 lawsuits targeting alleged copyright scofflaws on peer-to-peer networks.

The targets include the elderly, students, children and even the dead. No one in the U.S. who uses Kazaa, Limewire or other file sharing networks is immune from the RIAA’s investigators, and fines under the Copyright Act go up to $150,000 per purloined music track.

But despite the crackdown, billions of copies of copyrighted songs are now changing hands each year on file sharing services. All the while, some of the most fundamental legal questions surrounding the legality of file sharing have gone unanswered. Even the future of the RIAA’s only jury trial victory — against Minnesota mother Jammie Thomas — is in doubt. Some are wondering if the campaign has shaped up as an utter failure.
“We’re just barely scratching the surface of the legal issues,” says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer and one of the nation’s few who have taken an RIAA defendant’s case. “They’re extorting people — and for what purpose?”

When the first round of lawsuits were filed on Sept. 8, 2003 — targeting 261 defendants around the country — it was a hairpin turn from the RIAA’s previous strategy of going after services like Napster, RIAA president Cary Sherman said at the time. “It is simply to get peer-to-peer users to stop offering music that does not belong to them.” The goal in targeting music fans instead of businesses was “not to be vindictive or punitive,” says Sherman.

Today, the RIAA — the lobbying group for the world’s big four music companies, Sony BMG, Universal Music, EMI and Warner Music — admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort, aimed at striking fear into the hearts of would-be downloaders. Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”

“Think about what the legal marketplace and industry would look like today had we sat on our hands and done nothing,” Duckworth says in a statement. (The RIAA declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Casey Lentz, a 21-year-old former San Francisco State student, is among those caught in the RIAA’s PR campaign.

“They’re harassing me nonstop,” says Lentz, who’s been trying to settle her RIAA case, but can’t afford a lawyer. “I wasn’t the one who downloaded the music. It was a shared computer with my roommates and my friends. They want $7,500 for 10 songs.”

“I told them I only had $500 in my bank account. And they said ‘no way,'” she says.

Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”

“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where you know they cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”

Settlement payments can be made on a website, where the funds are used to sue more defendants. None of the money is paid to artists.

The quick settlements have left largely unexamined some basic legal questions, such as the legality of the RIAA’s investigative tactics, and the question of what proof should be required to hold a defendant liable for peer-to-peer copyright infringement

In two cases, judges have ruled that making songs available on a peer-to-peer network does not constitute copyright infringement — the RIAA has to show that someone actually downloaded the material from a defendant’s open share folder. One of those cases is still mired in pretrial litigation. In the other, an Arizona judge issued a $40,000 judgment last week in favor of the recording industry, after learning the defendant tampered with his hard drive to conceal his downloading.

The so-called “making available” issue also emerged, belatedly, in the only RIAA file sharing lawsuit to go to trial: the case against Thomas, a Minnesota mother of three, who was slammed with a $222,000 judgment last year for sharing 24 tracks in her Kazaa folder.

Months after the Duluth, Minnesota jury’s October verdict, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis called the lawyers back to his courtroom. He said he likely committed a “manifest error” in the case by instructing (.pdf) the jury that merely offering music was infringement.

Judge Davis is expected any day to declare a mistrial in the case, and rule that the Copyright Act demands a showing of an actual “transfer” of files from Thomas’ share folder. If that line of reasoning is followed elsewhere, it endangers a key prong of the RIAA’s litigation strategy. The association believes it is technically impossible to prove that files offered on a peer-to-peer user’s shared folders were actually downloaded by anyone besides its own investigators. “It’s all done behind a veil,” RIAA attorney Donald Verrilli Jr. argued in the Thomas case last month.

That doesn’t mean the RIAA would be dead in the water. The recording industry could try to prove, through forensic examination, that the shared files were pirated to begin with, i.e., that the defendant infringed copyright law by downloading the music, before sharing it again. It’s also possible the courts will find that — as the RIAA has argued — downloads by the RIAA’s investigators can be considered infringement by the file sharer; digital rights advocates counter the recording industry should not be able to pay investigators to make downloads of its own music, and then declare them unauthorized copies.

The RIAA’s investigative tactics have come under attack as well. In a few states — Michigan, Texas, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and Arizona — state governments and RIAA defendants have challenged the qualifications of the private company that develops the music industry’s cases.

MediaSentry — aka SafeNet — specializes in logging into peer-to-peer networks, where it downloads some music, takes screenshots of open share folders and documents the offending IP address. The RIAA’s position is that the online sleuthing isn’t covered by state laws regulating private investigators. But Michigan (.pdf) recently disagreed, and told MediaSentry it needed a private investigator’s license to continue practicing in that state.

Against that shifting legal backdrop, a handful of universities, including the University of Oregon, have begun refusing to divulge students’ names in file sharing lawsuits, on privacy grounds.

Nobody can credibly dispute that file sharing systems are a superhighway for pirated music. “There is no doubt that the volume of files on P2P is overwhelmingly infringing,” says Eric Garland, president of Los Angeles research firm BigChampagne. But critics of the RIAA say it’s time for the music industry to stop attacking fans, and start looking for alternatives. Fred von Lohmann, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the lawsuits are simply not reducing the number of people trading music online.

“If the goal is to reduce file sharing,” he says, “it’s a failure.”

www.rockrap.com

‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’

Inside Higher Ed: ‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’
‘Teach Them to Challenge Authority’

Stanley Fish may be telling academics to keep their opinions to themselves, but Gregory S. Prince Jr. thinks it is time for colleges to stop trying to make their classrooms neutral. Prince, the former president of Hampshire College, argues for professors to take all kinds of positions — as a tool for challenging their students. His new book, Teach Them to Challenge Authority: Educating for Healthy Societies (Continuum) outlines this view, and Prince responded via e-mail to questions about the work.

Q: What’s wrong with a neutral stance in the classroom?

A: A neutral stance in the classroom is appropriate as one of many pedagogical approaches. When it becomes the only pedagogical approach, it deprives students of the chance to learn how to challenge those who have power over them — a skill that is essential in any career, that is essential for the health of any institution and that is critical in a democratic society. Higher education should have been very concerned that at a place like Enron, where almost all of its senior departmental and corporate leadership were college educated, only two at most challenged what was taking place.

Q: You note the criticism that conservatives hurl on liberal academics. Do you think academics have adequately defended themselves?

A: Academics have not adequately defended themselves. Too often they have ignored the critics or taken the position that there is no problem. As the first step in mounting an adequate defense, they should acknowledge that the conservatives are right about the principle that students should not be ridiculed for disagreeing with their professors. They should acknowledge that students should be encouraged to disagree with the politics of their professors. They should acknowledge their responsibility to listen respectfully to opposing points of view and to guide students to sources that support such views.

What happens all too often is that they deny there is a problem rather than challenging the proposed solution to the problem. The problem always will exist because there always will be individuals who cannot or will not master the difficult art of effective teaching. In contrast, I accept that the there are undoubtedly many cases where the critics are right but that to whatever extent the problem exists, the solution that the conservatives propose — having the faculty always maintain a position of neutrality — is the wrong one. Faculty need to take positions so that students can learn how to challenge those in authority. How a faculty member takes a positions is what is critical. It is an art both to take positions and to create an atmosphere in which students will learn how to challenge those positions

Q: What advice would you give to professors who agree with your book, but who teach at institutions where students are more conservative than those at Hampshire?

A: I would give them the same advice that I would give to Hampshire faculty and to faculty in any university. Acknowledge the differences where they exist, listen well to the students, create an atmosphere where they can challenge your positions, respect the students enough to take their positions seriously and be willing to state your own positions and to engage the students in discussion and debate about those positions.

Q: How can you tell if a university is “engaged” in the way you advocate?

A: Universities that test themselves by asking constantly whether they are doing enough and then push themselves to do more are engaged in the way I advocate. What made Hampshire such an exciting place for me was its culture that made asking whether we were doing enough in the classroom, with individual students and with the community outside the college a perpetual part of the educational conversation. Often what we were doing was good, but measured against what was needed, it was rarely good enough. Students are an important part of that conversation because they so often are impatient and feel that so much more can be done. They helped fight complacency that all too often is the greatest danger to delivering a quality educational experience. As a completely different kind of example, land grant institutions, with their explicit service missions that have served this country so well, generally are and have to be, in constant conversations with their legislatures and the public whom they serve about whether “they are doing enough.” Those conversations, difficult as they are sometimes, benefit the academy and the public.

Q: How can presidents protect the freedom of their professors to teach as you suggest — and encourage it?

A: The most effective way is to model in their own behavior what they expect of the faculty, to articulate and practice the principles of discourse that make it possible simultaneously to take positions and to encourage students to challenge those positions and pursue a review and reward system that supports the principles. Confront constructively and fairly and do not ignore those situations where the practices of faculty do not support the core value of the principles of discourse — that what matters is the strength and integrity of one’s argument and rhetoric, not the political hue of the opinion being defended.

— Scott Jaschik
The original story and user comments can be viewed online at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/04/prince.

Gustav and the Dome…This time officials padlock Superdome as hurricane sweeps through New Orleans

Here’s a short piece from David Zirin, author of Welcome to the Terrordome, on Hurricane Gustav and the response of officials in New Orleans:

Gustav and the Dome
By Dave Zirin

Witness the massive padlock, tightly hugging its doors. That will tell you all you need to know about Hurricane Gustav and the federal government s carefully orchestrated response. The padlock, roughly the size of a Frisbee, is set firmly around the doors of the Louisiana Superdome. The padlock articulates a message that would be clear to even a Bush or a Brownie: this storm will not be Katrina. By that I don t mean, We ve learned a lot in the last three years or whatever talking points the White House is putting out.

The padlock makes clear that the public relations hurricane battle has been well engaged. There will be no photo ops of 30,000 people herded into a luxury stadium that magically morphs into a homeless shelter from hell. There will be no opening up the stadium to the poor and unwashed, not after spending 185 million bucks.to rebuild the dome and not with the NFL season right around the corner. There will be no one left behind, even if it means putting people on buses, taking them hundreds of miles away, and not even telling them the destination for them and their families. And, more than anything else, the padlock in all of its glistening, metallic glory, is a self-incriminating indictment. It is an admission that despite what we were told three years ago, a stadium isn t really shelter; that the act of forcing people at gunpoint into the dome was a criminal act; and that believing any stadium could have redeeming social value as an emergency evacuation center, is a lie.

The padlock on the Superdome prevents any more ugly backdrops for When the Levees Broke II , and preserves the pristine field for Drew Brees, Reggie Bush, and the rest of the Saints. But it also raises more questions than answers: if people aren t in the dome, then where are they?

Where are New Orleans 12,000 homeless residents, double the pre-Katrina numbers?

Where are the 17,000 residents of greater New Orleans still living in FEMA trailers?

Where will people live when they return? Why won t the city call for the suspension of the planned bulldozing of the city s four largest housing projects? How will the people being bussed out, be able to move back if their homes have been flattened? If people can t make it home, will they find their residence somewhere even more frightening than the dome?

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said over the weekend, “Anybody who’s caught looting in the city of New Orleans will go directly to Angola [Louisiana State Penitentiary]. You will not have a temporary stay in the city. You go directly to the big house, in general population.

Considering that many of the so called looters after Katrina, were fighting for their lives, and considering that the media had color-coded looters, with white residents classified as heroes, the implications of Nagin s dictate is chilling. It s horrifying to think that they could be laying their head in the former slave plantation known as Angola.

And what will the fate be of the hero as of now, the wetlands? The wetlands absorbed the worst of Gustav, before the hurricane slammed into the great city. As New Orleans resident and comedian Harry Shearer said, We re losing Wetlands at a rate of a football field every 45 minutes.
The padlock is also a reminder of all the people, 25% of the pre-Katrina population, who haven t been able to return to the city. How can they have the hope of return when rents have gone up 46% in the last two years? When will this ever be addressed?

The future of New Orleans will depend on our ability to answer these questions. And no amount of shameless political posturing can avoid this.

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming A People s History of Sports in the United States (The New Press) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION, LABOR AND EMANCIPATION

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MANIFESTO FOR NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: EQUITY, ACCESS, & EMPOWERMENT

The Conferences on Education, Labor and Emancipation are always exciting, one of the best conference experiences you’ll ever have, I highly recommend you check out the 2009 conference, which will be held in Salvadore, Brazil.

June 16-19, 2009
Hotel Othon, Salvador, Bahia (Brazil)

We are currently witnessing the emergence of a new context for education, labor, and emancipatory social movements. Global flows of people, capital, and energy increasingly define the world we live in. The multinational corporation, with its pursuit of ever-cheaper sources of labor and materials and its disregard for human life, is replacing the nation-state as the dominant form of economic organization. Faced with intensifying environmental pressures and depletion of essential resources, economic elites have responded with increased militarism and restriction of civil liberties.

At the same time, masses of displaced workers, peasants, and indigenous peoples are situating their struggles in a global context. Labor activists can no longer ignore the concomitant struggles of Indigenous peoples, African diasporic populations, other marginalized ethnic groups, immigrants, women, GLBT people, children and youth. Concern for democracy and human rights is moving in from the margins to challenge capitalist priorities of “efficiency” and exploitation. In some places, the representatives of popular movements are actually taking the reins of state power. Everywhere we look, new progressive movements are emerging to bridge national identities and boundaries, in solidarity with transnational class, gender, and ethnic struggles.

At this juncture, educators have a key role to play. The ideology of market competition has become more entrenched in schools, even as opportunities for skilled employment diminish. We must rethink the relationship between schooling and the labor market, developing transnational pedagogies that draw upon the myriad social struggles shaping students’ lives and communities. Critical educators need to connect with other social movements to put a radically democratic agenda, based on principles of equity, access, and emancipation, at the center of a transnational pedagogical praxis.

Distinguished scholars from numerous fields and various countries will convene in Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) to compare and contribute to theoretical perspectives, share pedagogical experiences, and work toward developing a global movement of enlightning activism. Issues related to education, labor, and emancipation will be addressed from a range of theoretical perspectives, including but not limited to the following:

* Critical Pedagogy

* Critical Race Theory

* Postcolonial Studies

* Marxist and Neo-Marxist Perspectives

* Social Constructivism

* Comparative/International Education

* Postmodernism

* Indigenous Perspectives

* Feminist Theory

* Queer Theory

* Poststructuralism

* Critical Environmental Studies

* Critiques of Globalization and Neoliberalism

* Liberation Theology

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Proposals may be offered as panel presentations or individual papers. Please indicate type of proposal with the submission.

Individual paper proposals should contain a cover sheet with the paper title, contact information (e-mail, address, telephone number, and affiliation), a brief bio, for each presenter, and an abstract of no more than 250 words (not including references). Please indicate whether you will present in Portuguese, Spanish or English. Presenters who wish to present in Portuguese should nevertheless include an English or Spanish translation of the abstract with their submission.

Panel proposals must include a cover sheet with the panel title and organizers’ contact information (e-mail, address, telephone number, affiliation), as well as an abstract of the overall panel theme (no more than 400 words, not including references) and abstracts/bios for each paper included in the panel. Please indicate whether panel members will present in Portuguese, Spanish or English. Proposals submitted in Portuguese should include translations (either English or Spanish) of the panel theme with each individual abstract.

Please submit proposals by E-mail only to: confele@utep.edu. THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS March 1st, 2009.

Following the tradition of the last three conferences, a book will be produced comprising the most engaging papers from CONFELE 2009, as selected by an editorial board. Presenters wishing to be considered for this volume should submit full papers (in APA style) for review by August 1st, 2009.

More on the gun-totin’ teachers of Harrold, TX

The New York Times: In Texas School, Teachers Carry Books and Guns

Boston rappers’ “Kill Bill O’Reilly” single condemned by media, for some reason

The Boston Herald reports that Boston rap trio East Coast Avengers’ new single, “Kill Bill O’Reilly,” whose lyrics call for the Fox News star to “be hanged like Benito Mussolini and otherwise killed,” is causing outrage among Reilly’s right-wing admirers and others, like Keith Olberman:

“Gentlemen, I’m the last person to disagree with you on the chicken hawk, lying coward, sexist, racist, needs a face-lift, whore stuff, but you really need to re-cut this track,” Olbermann said addressing the Avengers last week on his MSNBC show “Countdown.” “Nobody’s life should be threatened, not even in the hyperbole of the moment. Beside, you are rappers. You have better ethics than Bill O’Reilly does. Live up to them. Don’t live down to him. Word to your mother.”

vote for nobody

Candidates for Sale

The late great Bill Hicks put it this way:

“They’re all the same. I’ll show you politics in America. Here it is right here:”

“I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.”

“I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.”

“Hey wait minute there’s one guy holding up both puppets!”

And here’s Matt Taibbi’s version of the story updated for the 2008 War for the White House, from the The Rolling Stone, Issue 1059 — August 21, 2008—What do Obama and McCain have in common? The same big donors, who will expect to have their way no matter who wins.

Hear the Bill Hicks bit here: