Real News Network highlighted a foreign broadcast on Spain’s “indignados,” and the way they have been providing advice to other anti-neoliberal movements around the world. I’m not sure it has gotten the attention it warrants, but the people that were involved in Occupy Wall Street early on conferred a good deal with seasoned protestors in Spain and Egypt.
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Comments are closed.
Question about a prior post:
When I click the title of Democrats are the Ones Pushing Web Censorship, I get a blank white space with no text and no comments. When I click on “comments” specifically, the comments show up for a fraction of a second and then all disappear and the field reverts to blank white space. Has anyone else seen that same thing?
I had the same problem. I pressed reload and then as the text appeared I pressed the stop loading button.
I had to download FireFox to see that page, but, oddly, only that page.
I took a quick look at the HTML and saw nothing amiss. Unfortunately, I have been between Windoze laptops now and so could not test in IE; in FireFox on IE there’s no problem. Later today I will have the laptop working and can test and report back.
Meanwhile, does the orginal post work at GW’s site?
WOW a bunch of unskilled workers/naive idealist college students/leftards are out protesting!!!! BIG DEAL
And one black woman wouldn’t sit in the back of the bus.
There is no denying that there exists a general disgust with our present system of crony capitalism.
And who is to say if there will be a spark or when or what the spark will be ?
It only takes one spark.
Actually bunches of bunches. And each one just like you! Imagine 100’s of thousands of your very own special self, on on the street, working for justice. Whoah.
Your world is dead, 92 failed banks in 2011. The rusted engines of capitalism stalled, headed for scrap value. New finance systems working now, growing now, fertilized by the decomosing corpse of capitalism.
http://fightforphilly.org/
From City Hall: Press Conference and Policy Debrief on Interest Rate Swaps
Posted by The Fight for Philly Staff on January 19, 2012
On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center released a new report documenting the millions of dollars that interest rate swaps promoted by bailed-out financial institutions have cost the City and School District of Philadelphia.
Swap deals negotiated with banks such as Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have cost the city and school district $331 million in net interest payments and cancellation fees, according to the report, “Too Big to Trust? Banks, Schools and the Ongoing Problem of Interest Rate Swaps.” If interest rates continue to remain low, still-active swaps could cost the city another $240 million in future net interest payments.
Fight for Philly joined the PBPC – and a host of community organizations including P.E.A.C.E., Jobs with Justice, ACTION United, Parent Power, Neighborhood Networks and Occupy The Dream – at the press conference and policy debrief discussing the findings of the report with City Council members, media and citizens. PBPC Director Sharon Ward noted that while taxpayers provided billions of dollars in bailouts to banks in the wake of the financial crisis, municipalities and school districts have been forced to cut services and lay off staff without receiving any financial consideration from the banks for the high cost of swap deals.
Three everyday Philadelphians that have been affected by these bad swap deals showed the real human cost of these deals gone wrong. Gloria Thomas, a parent of a public school student and secretary of Parent Power, spoke about how the school budget cuts are destroying our schools. She explained how “the financial situation in the Philadelphia School District has left Principals with the inability to adequately fund [school] programs.”
thanks for reporting in. the states and municipalities have been flattened by the neoliberal takeover and have yet to wake up to what’s happened. i see hope there, as they begin to realize how they’ve been collectively hung out to dry, because there’s still a lot of power they can exercise if they have a mind to. this remains true despite the setback for the state this week in the ruling in entergy v. vermont.
i notice in the last para. this new expression that i hate: “everyday” Philadelphians in this case, but this was invented, i think, by those who sold us obama: “everyday” people, everyday americans, etc.
what does this word mean? (and why can’t one say “ordinary”? what term has this replaced?)
Webster’s defines “everyday”: “encountered or used routinely or typically; ordinary “.
is it a euphemism for all people at or below the median income level, whose real name we dare not speak aloud because it makes them sound too real (=dirty)? surely we don’t think it refers to people who can give more than $1000 to a political campaign. those are not everyday people; they are special people. they and everyone else knows this word does not refer to them.
everyday people are people who do not count. we are trying to show how deeply we respect them by not calling them working class, lower middle class, and the like because everyone knows what those words mean and it’s not good.
surely, everyday people are not the poor or the underclass. those people are not everyday, they do not get up and go to work every day, like the everyday people do.
ok, enough on that. just saying when i see that word i wonder who is responsible for it showing up, and why.
“They work every day,” from Jesse Jackson’s great convention speech. That’s my guess. (Either that, or Sly and the Familiy Stone…)
Of course, Axelrod’s shills could have appropriated it.
Nice catch. Corrupt language is incredibly important to watch out for.
EVERYDAY PEOPLE BY SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
Seriously Lambert, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
From the 1968 hit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVOR28iG_o
@ paul tioxon,
thanks for educating me on this, i am woefully illiterate re: popular music lyrics and the like. believe it or not i was unaware of these lyrics.
i still would like to know more how the expression traveled from the song in 1968 to the obama marketers in 2008.
at any rate, i am not pleased with how it has now been taken over by the spin perps, as i think it has. they are using it cynically.
One of the cornerstones of contemporary fascism is its friendliness. The corporations don’t need the Fed to enable their distribution of ‘respect’, which is just about the only thing still trickling down. The other side of the respect coin is political correctness. You cannot make jokes any more about anyone except rich, straight, thin, ivy educated white men with full heads of hair. What is funny about them?
The idea is to make everyone nice and polite and friendly, while THEY continue looting and stealing. Have you ever had a tantrum when confronted with some affront by customer service, and then been nonplussed when he/she takes your anger personally and threatens to disconnect or report you?
Hostility can only be expressed in Harvard of Stanford speak, in which case it is permitted to euphamize as much violence and hatred as can be imagined.
But let one who only finished high school speak his or her mind, and that kind conversation is simply not appropriate for polite company.
I late friend, well educated in the classics, used to tell me that table manners were introduced as a means of class distinction.
It is not the substance of what you say that counts, it is how you say it that is really important.
Don’t you think that “everyday” is code for “loser” acc. to the 1% & pol Agents?
Paul, “destroying our schools” – that is their purpose.
Friedmanite, we know that “leftard” is code for “f&*ktard.”
Do you think you are cool yet?
Will you please stop callingh organized poltical fronts of the Hard Left “dissent”, and, while you are at it, stop legitimizing and valorizing this Coumminist tactic by conflating it with legitmate expersions of the real polity of nations.
This is a standard tactic of the hard left, and it has been obseved and documented for more than a century. Either you are a useful idiot or you are one of this horde. If it is the former, I suggest you grow up, learn some history,get a grasp of how the real world works and learn to think for yourself.
The vipers behind this sort of thing are worse than tyrant. They are Nihilists of the worst sort. They wish to dismantle civilziation itself. Their forebears left hundreds of millions of corpses in their wake in the last century, and materially and spiritually degraded and diminished the lives of millions, indeed billions, more.
This crowd includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez and Hitler.
You should be ashamed of yourself, but you are incapable of it.
Oh, really, ohreally?> Models like Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution, or Tunisia’s democratic turn in the Arab Spring might suggest otherwise. In fact, you’ll find many protests energized by fear that some current “western” regimes are lurching towards tyranny without outside help. I guess those governments should be called the Hard Middle.*
*Since civilization is apparently crumbling around us, I’ll ignore your invocation of Godwin’s law.
I don’t know about you, but what energizes me is the fear of being ruled by right-wingers who can’t spell.
Owch.
I had to look-up on Wikipedia the meaning
of “useful idiot” in ohreally’s comment.
“Useful idiot” is political jargon for
“dumb follower” or “pawn of some masterminds”,
i.e. someone used as a tool …
Sufferin’, AND who are eager to show how ignorant and stupid they are.
ohreally, is that friedmanite?
Your words are (quite literally) viperish, tyrannical, nihilistic, spiritually degraded, diminished, idiotic, shameful, dismantling, corpse-ish, hording.
Good projection, there, buddy.
“I suggest you grow up, learn some history,get a grasp of how the real world works and learn to think for yourself.”
Just sayin’…
the four top mass killers of the twentieth century were mao, stalin, hitler, and chiang kai-shek.
go to school, learn to read and write, and you can become a spin doctor and earn a real salary. they are much in demand these days.
Fidel has been no slouch, and with a much smaller population to work with. I am told his criminal justice system has two punishments for political dissent: death (that same day) and thirty years. I am not certain what distinuishes the lives of those doing thirty years and those who remain at large.
Now, there is a guy who pushed through Hope and Change.
Is this the best hung over interns from the National Review can do on a Saturday morning. You, know, when I was young nihilist mispending my youth on groovy acid trips with the weather underground, the Patrice Lumumba Direct Action Brigades of Vehement Resistence, we could wake up at the crack of dawn counter punch reactionary editorial responses with more elan, calculated poltical effect and academic rigor than any smart phone carrying thumb sucking right wing panty waist that I see on a blog 24/7. Grow a set you mama’s boy. hah
Paul, excellent rant. For the record, it’s “panty-waste.” Makes more sense now, doesn’t it?
Coumminist??? Oh, well, at least you know the difference between “hoard” and “horde.”
..”learn a little history”??
someone obviously has not read Wiliam Blum’s, “Killing Hope”, a TRUE=documented-over 200 pages of footnotes representation of CIA history..
someone also hasn’t done Adam Curtis’ “Trilogy”, nor Perkins’, “Confessions of An Economic Hit Man”, nor Geisst’s, “Wall $treet-A History”, nor Naomi Klein’s,
“The Shock Doctrine”, nor Kevin Phillips’ “American Dynasty”-“American Theocracy”, nor Chris Hedges (who just filed legal suit against Obama-un-Constitutional legislation) recent books, nor “Are We Rome?”, nor Socrates, nor
Voltaire, Lao-Tzu, Chuang-Tzu, Krishnamurti, Shakespeare (36 plots of Literature), nor James Bamford’s 3 books on NSA, nor Robert Johnson, William Black, Michael Hudson, Yves Smith (ECONned) on economic disaster=U.S. $6.5 trillion, world $16.5 trillion per year economies destroyed now for over 3 years
on the way to 10-20 more…
Meanwhile, Ayn Rand-Milton Friedman “Free market should regulate itself”era
have proven completely unable to FOLLOW THE $$$$$ to PROVE what actually
was done by Wall $treet…which some here are capable of doing and debating..
CIA was set up under FDR, the Progressive’s Progressive.
IMF was set up under FDR.
World Bank was set up under FDR.
So the major organs of US oppression around the world are ‘Progressive’. Likewise, the major means the Oligarchy has of oppressing us here in the US are all Progressive constructs.
Your ‘neoliberal’ meme is a nice attempt to blame the wrong people.
If you give the government power, it will be used against you.
When those institutions were first set up in the ’40s, their mandate may have technically been the same, but the guiding philosophy was almost 180 degrees opposite. In recognition of the carnage of two world wars and a depression, not to mention numerous now forgotten mini-crises, they were designed to be a mechanism for global economic stability, growth, and international cooperation. They were basically the economic equivalent of the UN, and together they used a combination of technocratic planning and trade liberalization to spread economic development. But in recent decades, they’ve been commandeered to relentlessly squeeze countries to neuter government regulations, downsize the welfare state, and end any attempt by countries to plan or even influence their economies for the benefit of broader society. Instead, governments are re-oriented to serve narrow (often multi-national) business interests, and policy-making is taken out of the democratic realm and put into the hands of lobbyists. If you feel that undemocratic technocratic processes are better than democratic technocratic processes that’s fine, but let’s recognize that these institutions are not what they were in the ’40s.
May I comment on your “if you give the gov’t power, it will be used against you”? Maybe, but if you don’t give the gov’t power, it doesn’t reside with you as a default, it is simply sucked over to another power base. There are a number of power bases in society: the government, the market, the church, the military, in some cases unions or other institutions…they act like electric magnets, and when you decrease the electricity to one, the iron filings (representing power) don’t disperse across a broad range, instead they are simply (and immediately)sucked over to the other magnets, depending on how much current each magnet has coursing through it.
That’s why it’s nonsensical to propose that government be weakened so that power be returned to the individual. That power will never reach the individual. But if government retains that power in the first place, then the individual has legal, constitutional representation and recourse of grievances. That’s why the democratic socialists of the twentieth century saw nationalization and regulation as great tools for democracy. And they were.
If we want to protect ourselves against overreach by government, the way to do that is to increase the electrical current to the other magnets, the other institutions such as unions. Power will never go directly to individual actors (sorry, libertarians and anarchists!), but individuals empowered through collective bargaining can be a real check to the system. That’s why I’m a big believer in the co-determination policies (Employee Councils) of post-war Germany and the EU. That has to be the future.
You can also make a case for subsidiarity, but that’s not the individual vs. group frame that you are referring to, but local government vs. centralized gov’t. And that’s a different discussion altogether.
Sorry, it wasn’t your ‘neoliberal meme’, but that has been in a lot of posts lately here at NC.
Definition of “Neoliberalism”
http://www.globalexchange.org/resources/econ101/neoliberalismdefined
“Neo-liberalism” is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo-liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
1.THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating “free” enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers’ rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say “an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone.” It’s like Reagan’s “supply-side” and “trickle-down” economics — but somehow the wealth didn’t trickle down very much.
2.CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply — again in the name of reducing government’s role. Of course, they don’t oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.
3.DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits, including protecting the environment and safety on the job.
4.PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.
5.ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” or “COMMUNITY” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.” Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves — then blaming them, if they fail, as “lazy.”
Around the world, neo-liberalism has been imposed by powerful financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. It is raging all over Latin America. The first clear example of neo-liberalism at work came in Chile (with thanks to University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman), after the CIA-supported coup against the popularly elected Allende regime in 1973. Other countries followed, with some of the worst effects in Mexico where wages declined 40 to 50% in the first year of NAFTA while the cost of living rose by 80%. Over 20,000 small and medium businesses have failed and more than 1,000 state-owned enterprises have been privatized in Mexico. As one scholar said, “Neo-liberalism means the neo-colonization of Latin America.”
In the United States neo-liberalism is destroying welfare programs; attacking the rights of labor (including all immigrant workers); and cutting back social programs. The Republican “Contract” on America is pure neo-liberalism. Its supporters are working hard to deny protection to children, youth, women, the planet itself — and trying to trick us into acceptance by saying this will “get government off my back.” The beneficiaries of neo-liberalism are a minority of the world’s people. For the vast majority it brings even more suffering than before: suffering without the small, hard-won gains of the last 60 years, suffering without end.
————-
If that ideology is one you adhere to, then you, by definition, are a “Neoliberal.” As a supporter of OWS, I do not give one whit as to who did what when, there is plenty of blame to be spread around on all sides. Pointing fingers is pointless. Facing facts and finding solutions matters. Time to move on (minus the dotorg).
PS–Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is a go-to primer for all things “Neoliberal”.
What “hard left”? The Trots?
Mr. Strether;
I suspect he means to formulate a ‘circular arguement.’ Go far Left enough and you end up with Paul, Gingritch, the Trilaterals etc. The Original, Unparalleled, Accept No Substitute Circle Jerks.
ohreally, who sent you?
Such posturing in the morning. One should update the list to include today’s leaders as well. Having an old Communist viewpoint today, is well, passe IMHO.
there is a lot of work to be done. but it won’t be done by the other 1%–the
comic book marxists, the loser left. it will be done by people who don’t
shit in tents, don’t use the people’s mic, don’t do drum circles, and don’t
call themselves lambert strether. OWS is a giant distraction, an irrelevance
of the first order.
its online commentators who drive public opinion.
sorry, its online commentators like you who drive public opinion.
Damn does this bring out the trolls in full force…
Not surprising. If I were a troll I’d be worried too about a movement that can generate more genuine enthusiasm in a single rally than currently exists in the entire Republican presidential campaign.
Or inject “income inequality” into the political discourse, something that the “progressives” haven’t been able to do in literally decades of trying. Oddly. Or not.
…a realization is coming to OWSers, that they are NOT “revolution”…therefore they AGITATE for CHANGE, which is what most Americans THOUGHT they elected in Bushbama..
as such, OWS is morphing as we speak…some of us are involved…in the streets
it was all “process”, without CONTENT=TRUTH our government and media have
hidden, regarding what Wall $treet has actually DONE to destroy a U.S. $6.5 trillion, world $16.5 trillion economies for 3 years already, on the way to 10-
20 more…(so says Gore Vidal, and many, many others).
As OWS morphs, a focus is to tell the American people the TRUTH about what was actually, done, to the degree people can follow the $$$$$ and hold those accountable currently scapegoating anyone-everyone they can…
As we all know (WikiLeaks) shows Obama had deal with Bush-Cheney to NOT
do “transparency, oversight, accountability” for election fraud, war fraud, economic fraud…OWS’s primary focus is shifting towards telling the American
people the TRUTH about each…
This is what is necessary.
Deep and accurate information about the machinations (mainly Republican) over the past thirty years or so is now freely available in books and on the web.
Public education and less disinformation is what is critical for fundamental change, if there is ever to be any.
Foppe, so “in force” that they must be trollbots.
Capitalism vs Socialism
Interesting way to explain the difference
Think about this…
An economics professor at Texas Tech said he had never failed a single
student, but had once failed an entire class.
The class (students) insisted that socialism worked since no one would be
poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. The professor then said,
“OK, we will have an experiment in this class on socialism.”
“All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so
no one will fail and no one will receive an A.”
After the first test the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The
students who had studied hard were upset while the students who had
studied very little were happy.
But, as the second test rolled around, the students who had studied little
studied even less and the ones who had studied hard decided that since
they couldn’t make an A, they also studied less. The second Test average
was a D.
No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around the average grade was an
F.
The scores never increased as bickering, blame, name calling, all resulted
in hard feelings and no one would study for anyone else.
To their great surprise all failed. The professor told them that socialism
would ultimately fail because the harder people try to succeed the greater
their reward (capitalism) but when a government takes all the reward
away (socialism) no one will try or succeed.
that sounds like Texas logic to me. Is there something about living in Texas that makes people violent and stupid?
ha ha
ware’s ma gun? I wonna shooot somethin daid!
yeah thanks to “texas logic” Texas is one of the richest country notheless we are constantly invaded by illegal mexicans,criminals and all other fucking parasite you LEFTARD love
What about the countries that tried liberalism\socialism?
Estimated number of victims
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
20 million in Nazi German
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam[4]
150,000 in Latin America
and Europe is collapsing,they can’t ever afford their welfare state AHAHAH
you left out Sweden!
I like a little bit of capitalism and a little bit of socialism at the same time, let ’em fight it out and keep the balance.
whadaya get wen you mix oil and morons? Texas.
ha ahahah hahahahah
I can’t waste my time like this. It’s embarrasing, when I think about it. But somehow it still cracks me up. :)
Ron Paul for county schoolboard!
Nobody for president.
Thanks for your support! (I’m not running, though.)
If we all vote for NOBODY
NOBODY WINS!
VOTE FOR NOBODY, BECAUSE YOU CAN TRUST NOBODY!!
RonPaul’s folk mostly live out West, where their great grand parents committed the genocide of winning the West. All of the indigenous peoples of the Americas are not impressed with how many millions died in Eurasia, since they have been almost completely wiped off the face of the earth by the 100’s of millions. The Irish smiliarly would be greater in number if not for the drive to extinction practiced by the British Crown, but for some strange reason the White Anglo Saxon Protestants of America seem mute on the bleeding of India for the sake of the British Empire. Esimates of death by famine dwarf all other industrial forms of death dealing.
http://jambudveep.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/an-explanatory-note-on-the-famines-in-india/
Holy Cow Paul! I’m a white anglo saxon protestant in real life, even though I don’t go to church and get kinda brown when i tan.
somehow I think all those folks would have ended up killing each other if the anglos hadn’t killed them.
the Indians of the west killed each other all the time. It’s amazing to contemplate, how much land and how few of them were there — and they still hunted each other down and killed each other. The Indians of India kill each other every day, especially the women. It makes me afraid of reincarnation. How can I get this lucky again? It makes me nervous and even getting rich and getting a big house in the Hamptons with a private golf course and collection of Bentley’s won’t solve the problem. This is why I sold $400 million of investments and gave the money to a homeless man on 120th and Lennox. he was surprised, then he destroyed himself with avarice and gluttony and shot his wife dead because she spit on his new shoes.
This is a theoretical problem for students of contemporary analysis, but one can’t dwell on it like rosary beads.
@Crazzy,
Please read some forensic history about native americans and indians before you make broad sweeping assertions about, people just kill people any way, whats a body to do?
Cortez and smallpox did the most damage, the rest was a mop up exorcize that took a few hundred years and is still continuing / ongoing.
Skippy… now go have a drink and pop a pill whilst looping these two songs for the hole night.
Shrivel up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4oVOFVhV_A
I. S. B.
Additional info
The name “Devo” comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution’ – the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society.”[2] This idea was developed as a joke by Kent State University art students Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis as early as the late 1960s. Casale and Lewis created a number of satirical art pieces in a devolution vein. At this time, Casale had also performed with the local band 15-60-75 (The Numbers Band). They met Mark Mothersbaugh around 1970, who introduced them to the pamphlet “Jocko Homo Heavenbound”,[3] which includes an illustration of a winged devil labeled “D-EVOLUTION” and would later inspire the song “Jocko Homo”. However, the “joke” became serious, following the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970 (a song about which, “Ohio”, would later be covered by Devo). This event would be cited multiple times as the impetus for forming the band Devo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devo
Hope it helps.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMF5vzvLyMQ
RonPaul4 – just hang it up. You are out of your league at NC.
@RP4P,
http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee-salaries/
Name Agency Title Salary
Mack Brown The University of Texas at Austin Head Coach $5,166,667
Richard D Barnes The University of Texas at Austin Head Coach $2,206,945
Rodney James Rohrich The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas PROFESSOR & CHAIRMAN $1,750,000
Walter Lowe The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Prof, NTC, Chair, Smith En $1,200,000
Raymond E Sawaya The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Chair $1,090,278
Gail Ann Goestenkors The University of Texas at Austin Head Coach $1,060,000
John Mendelsohn The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center President $1,019,075
Andrew Burgess The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Visiting Professor NT $1,000,000
Hazim Safi The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Prof & Director & Chair $1,000,000
Kevin Gill The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas Professor $1,000,000
James Willerson The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Prof&Edward Randall III Chr IM $998,315
Joseph M Forbess The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas Associate Professor $983,500
Dong Kim The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Professor and Chairman $975,700
Daniel K Podolsky The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas President $921,284
Scott B. Ransom University of North Texas Health Science Center President $905,042
August E Garrido Jr The University of Texas at Austin Head Coach $900,000
C Kern Wildenthal The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR COMMUNITY AFFAIRS $841,557
Mark Adickes The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Assistant Professor NTC $825,000
Giuseppe Colasurdo The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston PresAI, Prof, Dean, Chair, En $825,000
Rex Marco The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Visiting Associate Professor $800,000
Francisco G Cigarroa University of Texas System Chancellor $750,000
Robert Keith Minkes The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas Professor $744,500
Anthony Estrera The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Professor $725,000
Richard Andrassy The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Prof, Chair Surgery, En $710,654
Darrell D Dodds The University of Texas at Austin Athletic Director $705,269
Agencies
Agency Type Maximum Salary Median Salary Number of Positions Last Update
State of Texas State $480,000 $35,975 151875 8-17-11
Houston ISD School District $300,000 $44,987 25514 7-26-11
Houston City $238,254 $48,421 21588 8-29-11
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center University Hospital $1,090,278 $54,600 18599 8-19-11
Dallas ISD School District $328,237 $50,451 17476
Harris County County $289,307 $44,699 14983 1-07-11
Dallas City $261,530 $41,461 13259 9-14-11
The University of Texas at Austin University $5,166,667 $48,279 12973 6-08-11
Northside ISD School District $267,335 $47,800 12899
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas University Hospital $1,750,000 $44,769 12770 6-08-11
+ More
Job Titles
Title Maximum Salary Median Salary Number of Positions
Teacher $106,583 $49,690 25952
Police Officer $85,030 $55,693 10447
CORREC OFFICER V $39,321 $37,037 9087
Correc Officer V $41,605 $35,784 8791
CORREC OFFICER IV $35,935 $34,883 7889
Correc Officer IV $37,572 $34,720 6504
Correc Offcr III $37,037 $32,952 6419
Professor $1,000,000 $114,169 6317
Assistant Professor $675,000 $76,065 6270
Mental Retardation Asst I $25,973 $10,266 4783
Source: Salary data provided by agencies under the Texas Public Information Act |
———–
Mack Brown The University of Texas at Austin Head Coach $5,166,667
AHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fooking Head Crotch Scratcher is the poster boy top earner!
Texas is a expanding toxic waste dump… see:
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/billionaire-plans-to-build-huge-toxic-waste-dump-in-texas.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/16/nation/la-na-0816-perry-donors-20110816
Perry has received a total of $37 million over the last decade from just 150 individuals and couples, who are likely to form the backbone of his new effort to win the Republican presidential nomination. The tally represented more than a third of the $102 million he had raised as governor through December, according to data compiled by the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice.
Nearly half of those mega-donors received hefty business contracts, tax breaks or appointments under Perry, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.
Perry, campaigning Monday at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, declined to comment when asked how he separated the interests of his donors from the needs of his state. His aides vigorously dispute that his contributors received any perks.
“They get the same thing that all Texans get,” said spokesman Mark Miner.
Along with Simmons — who won permission to build a low-level radioactive waste disposal site in Texas, a project that promises to generate hundreds of millions of dollars — The Times found dozens of examples in which major donors to Perry have benefited during his tenure.
http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/05/dumping-in-dixie-toxic-waste-from-ny-river-cleanup-headed-to-texas.html
In a bit of good news for the environment, work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York’s Upper Hudson River.
But there’s also some bad news — which is that the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas.
“This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another,” said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter. “We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses.”
The company that operates the landfill also recently won approval to dump radioactive waste there, intensifying the controversy surrounding the facility.
The $750 million Hudson River dredging project aims to scrape up almost 250,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, chemicals once used in electrical equipment that are known to build up in the body and cause cancer, damage the immune system and lead to reproductive disorders. The cleanup is being overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Skippy… its all about jobs… roflol.
thanks skippy for the numbers… it’s all about jobs … good one! i will spread it.
..some of us here have actually taught internationally…we KNOW comparing U.S. to European test scores, for example, is comparing apples and oranges.
Why do people suppose only test scores are compared, but NEVER HOW these
scores are accomplished? Answer-because Europe (for example) features FULLY-EDUCATED WORKFORCE, through 4 year university OR vocational equivalent…ALL are supposed to succeed. Around 80% do. Taxbase therefore
is the priority…
On the other hand, in states, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, circa 2001, average
wage for middle-class family of 4=$45,000.00 gross. Total number of actual JOBS PAYING $45,000.00 per year=20% of Jobs available….number of graduates
in U.S. from 4 year university OR vocational equivalent=20%…get it?
Business scapegoats education as provider of “OPPORTUNITY”…it was NEVER “educational opportunity” people were after=it was ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY.
When comparing math scores-Europeans, one must comprehend after 8th grade, only youth with math APTITUDE continue to take math-ALL American students are forced to do so…aptitude or no…of course U.S. media tells Americans NONE of this…
Grading on “curve”-my Dad was Physics-Chemistry Prof=Stanford. I changed his mind on “curve” when explaining CURVE is accomplished on the way INTO
classroom..so many “A” students, so many “B”, so many “C”, etc…they are PLACED by previous grades-winner take all. Is it any surprise “losers”, who over and over find their aptitude ignored, rebel or give up?…
Rather than abstract stories, let’s tell one another the TRUTH about education..
So “government is like a classroom”? I suppose that’s a welcome change from “government is like a household,” or “government should be run like a business.”
“Public” education is at this moment being disenfranchised with move to control education by business=”Charter Schools”, which recent Stanford survey noted
performed worse, often by far, than public…of course! No skin (literally) in the
game-only PROFIT$$$..
Charter schools are meant to fail, but before they do, to end public schools. Public schools, state to state, will in upcoming years be impossible to fund, as
Wall $treet economic destabilization wor$en$…state revenues spiral downward,
with wages=classical definition of “depression”….
The REAL objective by fundamentali$t$ is INTERNET $CHOOL$….whereby ALL content is controlled…no messy teachers injecting TRUTH…historical OR economic…
Lambert, “nonclassical” tells us proudly how he taught his Dad a lesson.
Consider the source.
“proudly”??…my Dad thinks circles around me…finished career with grade 1 Pentagon clearance-“star wars” for Boeing-anything infrared tracking system
oriented-Quadulane..figured how many “killer satellites” necessary for all trajectories intercept, from aphelion to perihelion…answer-over 350…never happen, before they fell out of sky…each cost $13 billion circa 2001…some of us challenged Bushit propagandists on NPR to tell us how many-how much, as they circulated airwave propaganda…(they wouldn’t say)…
In this era, the value of protest-action can be directly measured by the number of paid trolls who come barreling in to spit and curse and wave their billy-clubs.
Apparently, the indignatos are extremely successful. And Lambert and Yves,
too. Congrats, all!
Laughter is indeed the best medicine. Practice every day!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ayEXuZ-mM&feature=related
Good God! Where are all of these trolls coming from?
They can’t get their act together to stop Willard and they’ve run out of their meagre supply of arguments in favor of economic oligarchy so they’ve got to take it out on SOMEONE.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXSvsEGlf84&feature=related
LOL!
Stephen Colbert explains it all:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/402492/november-16-2011/tip-wag—pin-ups-for-ron-paul–movie-torture-tactics—offensive-merchandisee-mechandise
…it’s usually only one or two, making the rounds, under different web name..
and they CAN’T debate issues…follow the $$$$ to tell anyone how U.S. $6.5 trillion, world $16.5 trillion economies have been destroyed over 3 years already, to 10-20 more…they are unable to do beyond spouting Rander dogma..remember, Rand herself NEVER debated economics…no professors allowed…
some of us learned 70’s-80’s South-Central America how Milton Friedman “Chicago Boys” operate…Leo Strauss, Irving Krstol, et al, leading to “Project For A New American Century” imperialism…
Stick, actually, they descend on sites in waves. Must be trollbots on a rolling schedule.
College Republicans, Republican Party interns.
Kochtopus Interns.
Right wing bloggers.
To the trolls:
Before launching in tirades about socialism, where, supposedly, every citizen is assited by the state…..
please explain to me why is the American Capitalism subsidized by the state? The megabanks in the US would not survive without massive subsidies from every sucker in the land. What has happened with the US since 2007 is, to me (who lived in an East-European country until 1990), a form of State-Sponsored Capitalism and Corporatism. There is no free-market economy in the US. So shut up.
What are you, some kind of IslamoNaziLeninMaoChavezHitlerLarryMoeCurlyJoeLIBERAL!!??
[thin ribbon of spittle runs out of corner of mouth]
i demand better trolling.
Perhaps we should set up a troll-booth. That’ll slow them up while somebody goes back and gets a sh*tload of dimes. :-P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbWg-mozGsU
..ohmygod cy79…
you don’t mean to tell those defending corporate capitalism they are defending
corporations situated in Communist China…????
How about the M-I Complex, the private for-profit prison system, and church “non-profit” enterprises that are tax-exempt, hence paid for by the taxpayer?
Let’s take away all of that Federal pork from Red States “work” crews and see what happens.
Indeed. I’m fairly insulted we aren’t even getting literate trolls. Where has Dan Duncan gone?
..it’s “Rob Peter to pay Paul”…St. Peter’s, down by the castle=royalty, whereby
the rich attend…to pay St. Paul’s diocese, up on the hill, attended by poor…
The troll actually used it correctly.
Republicans want to rob poor people to give more money to rich people.
I’m just glad he was willing to admit it publically!
Right. They need to ring in those demand deposits for Fat Cat banks.
YVES, I was told by a banker in Savannah that Bank of America had/has a MONOPOLY on the business of the rank and file Armed Forces. Will someone please investigate this for veracity? if so, another scandal: the FIX is in, leaving the soldier with no choice in a “free enterprise system.” and local banks screwed.
Last week the D trolls were all over the blog claiming Matt Stoller supported Ron Paul.
This week the RP trolls are all over the blog claiming Yves is a comsymp.
What I wonder is whether any of ’em are working for different clients under different handles; really good trolling is worth something, and you could hardly blame them for freelancing as much as they can while the campaign season runs.
Anyhow, a blog that can piss off both Ds and Rs is doing something really right.
…Bushbama forever…(Heritage Foundation)…
move the “center” far enough “right” is the game…
So, isn’t it likely that these are sets of trollbots run by quant algos?
To the trolls: please click on the ads on your way out.
One comment above was deleted and the poster banned for sock puppeting himself. A troll using multiple handles to create the impression of more widespread opposition than exists is grounds for insta banning and expungement of comments.
Several trolls have been banned and one had some comments unpublished due to stupidity and lack of value added. See Barry Ritholtz’s platypus rule.
Do you know that your site more than occasionally rejects highly intelligent, literate, amusing, insightful and noteworthy comments for no apparent reason? What happens is I hit submit and the comment fails to appear. Then I hit submit again and am chided with ‘you’ve already said that’.
Considering some of the stuff that does keep showing up, I suspect there is no rhyme or reason to these rejections.
Don’t worry though. I am nearly impossible to discourage.
By asserting that the enemy is neoliberalism, the man in the interview suggests that capitalism itself is OK. The system does not need to be overturned but merely tweaked; somehow the people need better representation.
But neoliberalism is not a thing in itself; it is capitalism on the attack. The various manifestations of neoliberalism–savaging social safety nets, outsourcing jobs, the war economy, the attack on public education–are part of the capitalist strategy of class war.
In capitalism, money is power. Capitalism never can be the basis of real democracy.
See “Thinking about Revolution” http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/revolution/Thinking.pdf
But, Dave, Reagan’s gift was to make democracy and capitalism equivalent. No, make that democracy = “free trade” on the British “Opium Wars” model.
Much has been made here–mainly by the trolls–of capitalism vs. socialism. Historically socialism has merely been managed capitalism. This is obvious when referring to European social democracy. But it is also true of the Communist variant, which might be more accurately called “state capitalism.”
That capitalism and Communism are two sides of the same coin has become very clear with the spectacle of the Chinese CP directing the world’s second or third largest capitalist economy.
We are at an historic moment. The Indignados and OWS and the people of the world are trying to envision and create real democracy. This will require a new paradigm, different from capitalism and Communism. The new paradigm must reject the idea that economic development is the basis of human development, and that ordinary people are merely the beneficiaries or victims of the actions of elites. It must base itself on a positive view of ordinary human beings, not economic or political elites, as the source of a new world.
The class war is over what values should shape society, what goals it should pursue, and who should govern it. A new world cannot be found in the values of the ruling elite, the mass murderers and sociopaths who run our world. It can only be discovered in the decency and good sense of the people whose work creates and sustains the bases of human life.
I was glad to see “nonclassical”‘s comments on the attack on public education. I happened to begin a job as Washington Director of the National PTA on the day that Sens. Moynihan and Packwood filed the Tuition Tax Credit Act (of 1977, I’m afraid), which marked the beginning of the current corporate attack on public schools.(I directed the National Coalition for Public Education in the defeat of the bill–by one vote–in the 95th Congress).
Here for “nonclassical” and all you others interested in public education is an article I published awhile ago on this topic.
YOU’LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH:
SCHOOLING AND SOCIAL CONTROL
by Dave Stratman
[newdemocracyworld.org]
(from New Democracy, Sept.-Oct. 1998)
A couple months ago these sample questions from the new MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), given to all Massachusetts students in grades 4, 8, and 10, appeared in the Boston Globe:
MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with a flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat. BIOLOGY: Create life. Estimate the difference in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis. HEALTH: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have 15 minutes.
The “sample” was a parody, of course, but it made an important point: the test was impossible. Students were subjected from 11 to 13 hours of tests in 17 days—longer than the tests required for college, graduate school, and law school combined. Some school systems, concerned that young people would not have the stamina to get them through day after day of test-taking, supplied high-energy snacks and drinks to the kids. Parents were encouraged to get their children to bed early. Teachers were told not to assign homework during the weeks of testing.
These are “high-stakes” tests. When they are fully operational, students in grades 4 and 8 will need to pass the state tests to be promoted; students in grade 10 will have to pass to be eligible to graduate. Teachers will be “held accountable” for their students’ grades. (Forty percent are expected to fail.) Schools in which students perform poorly on the tests can be placed in receivership by the state and their faculties dismissed.
The contents of the MCAS are secret: no educators in Massachusetts except certain officials of the Department of Education and the Board of Education have been allowed to examine the tests for their age-appropriateness or their relationship to what is actually taught. The tests were devised by a company which had recently been fired by the state of Kentucky for major errors in the design and marking of tests it had administered there.
In literature circulated to parents and students before the tests, corporate backers of “higher standards” boasted that “These are very, very tough tests—the toughest that most Massachusetts students have ever taken” and that “good attendance and passing grades” no longer entitle a student to a high school diploma. To prepare our students “to compete with children from all over the world,” said the corporations, much more is required.
Tests similar to MCAS are being required of young people in state after state. President Clinton is fighting for national assessments along the same lines.
What’s behind this rush to testing and “higher standards?”
MAKING SCHOOLS “LEAN AND MEAN”
As is often the case, these developments inside the schools reflect events in the wider society.
In the past two decades, corporations have adopted new management techniques designed to undermine worker solidarity and integrate workers more thoroughly into the company machine. Known variously as “continuous improvement” or “management by stress,” or “kaizen,” the Japanese term for it, the technique consists essentially of dividing the workforce into competing “teams” and “stressing” the production system by imposing higher and higher production quotas. As workers work faster and faster to meet the quotas, the company achieves several key goals: production is increased; jobs are eliminated; “weak links” in the system break down and are replaced.
Most important, “continuous improvement” creates great anxiety in workers about their ability to meet the ever-increasing goals, and encourages workers to replace solidarity among themselves with loyalty to the Company Team. It forces workers into constant speed-up. Workers are kept running so fast to meet company goals that they don’t have time to think or talk about their own goals or work together to pursue them.
Corporate-led education reforms use similar strategies. They use “School-Based Management” to isolate teachers in each school from their colleagues around the system. Teachers are then encouraged to join with management as a “team” to compete for students and survival with other schools.
The reforms use testing to keep raising the standards which students and teachers must meet, far beyond what their parents were expected to achieve and beyond anything that would be of value. The purpose is the same as “continuous improvement” in a factory: raise the anxiety level and keep students and teachers running so fast to meet the goals set by the system that they have no time to think about their own goals for education or for their lives.
These reforms will have terrible effects. Many students who would otherwise graduate from high school will drop out. (In Texas and Florida, where “high-stakes” testing is in place, high school drop-out rates which had been dropping have already begun to rise.) Young people who fail to meet the new standards will be condemned to marginal jobs and told to blame themselves.
The reforms redefine education as a process whereby young people constantly “remake” and sell themselves to the corporations. The reforms attack the self-knowledge and understanding of unsuccessful and successful students alike, as young people are encouraged to redefine themselves—their own goals, their own thoughts and hopes and desires—out of existence, to make themselves acceptable to our corporate masters.
Our children have qualities more important than those desired by corporate Human Resource directors. Education conceived in this way makes economic productivity the goal and measure of human of society and makes the corporations the judges of human worth. It undermines the notion that human beings individually and collectively possess goals which transcend capitalism.
CONFLICT OVER EDUCATIONAL GOALS
There is no more vital issue to understand in education than this: The corporate and political elite who dominate education policy have goals for education which contradict the goals of the people who populate the schools: teachers and students and their families.
Public schools were supported by the industrial elite in America with the explicit intention of strengthening elite control over the working population. In the middle of the nineteenth century Horace Mann, the founder of the “common school,” explained the rationale for public schools: “…common schooling would discipline the common people to the point where they would not threaten the sanctity of private property or practice disobedience to their employer.”* Public schools have been used ever since to instill in young people a respectful attitude toward those in power. William Bennett, while Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, explained, “The primordial task of the schools is the transmission of social and political values.” In a class society, the values which the schools are designed to transmit are the values of the dominant class—competition, inequality, the sanctity of private property, and the belief that the good things in society trickle down from the elite.
At the heart of the education system, there is a conflict over its goals. On one side stand educators and parents and students, most of whom share democratic values and want to see students educated to the fullest of their ability. On the other side stand the corporate and government elite, the masters of great wealth and power. Their goal is that students be sorted out and persuaded to accept their lot in life, whether that be the executive suite or the unemployment line, as fitting and just, and that social inequality be legitimized and their hold on power reinforced.
This conflict over the goals of schooling is never acknowledged openly, yet it finds its way into every debate over school funding and educational policy and practice, and every debate over education reform.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE SCHOOLS?
The corporate critique of the schools has served to cover up what’s really wrong with them: the schools promote inequality, competition, and unquestioning acceptance of the social order.
The elite pursue these educational goals in many ways. Shortages in school funding undermine the work of students and teachers and tell them that they are not valued. School-business partnerships promote business values in the schools. Textbooks teach that history is made by presidents and kings; ordinary people are dismissed as passive victims or a dangerous problem.
But many of the means of achieving elite goals for education are far more subtle:
*The schools assume that there are big differences in people’s intelligence and that most people are not very smart, and are designed to “prove” these low expectations. Teachers are trained to find supposed differences in children’s abilities; standardized, “norm-referenced” tests are designed to sort kids out and produce a range of test scores which match the social hierarchy—in other words, which show that richer people are smarter. Shortages of teachers and textbooks, lack of support for their work, and countless other devices are means by which students and teachers are set up to fail.
*The schools use competition and ranking to legitimize the social hierarchy. Students reluctant to compete for approval get low marks: what is really a conflict over values is seen as a failure of students’ intelligence. For teachers, school life consists more often of an isolated struggle to survive than being encouraged to join with other teachers to nurture students.
*Course content often has no value except as a measure of students’ willingness to master it. Much of the content consists of “facts” torn out of their social context, with all the life sucked out of them, because their life is rooted in the class war the elite seek to obscure.
These and other means are used by schools to prepare most students for working lives spent performing boring tasks with unquestioning obedience in a “democracy” in which the goals of society are not up for discussion and in which the idea of people acting collectively for their own goals is considered subversive.
WHAT’S RIGHT WITH THE SCHOOLS?
Teachers and students and their families share goals which contradict the goals of the elite, and they work to achieve these goals in every way they know how in spite of elite domination. The gigantic effort by corporate and political leaders to impose education reform is necessary precisely because the people in the schools have worked for their goals with enough success to threaten elite control.
When teachers stimulate and challenge; when they encourage all their students to learn and inspire them to think about the world as it really is; when they create a nurturing environment; when they fight for smaller class sizes; when they offer each other words of support: when they do any number of things they do every day, they are opposing elite goals for education and working for the shared goals of ordinary people.
When students help each other, or raise critical questions, or refuse to join in the race for grades and approval; when they exercise their curiosity and intelligence; even when they hang on the phone for hours, talking about “life,” they are resisting elite goals and working for a better concept of life.
When parents listen sympathetically to their children, or talk with their friends or each other about the school or raising kids: when people do these things that they do every day, they are resisting elite goals and working for the opposite values of solidarity and equality and democracy.
To the extent that students succeed in real learning and teachers in teaching and parents in raising their children to be thoughtful and considerate, they succeed in spite of the education system, not because of it.
The remarkable thing about the public schools isn’t that some teachers become demoralized and “burned out,” or that some students drop out or do poorly, but that so many teachers and students achieve so much in the face of a system designed to fail.
EDUCATION AND REVOLUTION
Capitalist society is based on slavery: the enslavement of workers to the wage system and the enslavement of human beings to things. Education worthy of the name must help set us free, not further bind us in chains. The conflict over the goals of education is part of the class war over the goals of society. Only a movement which challenges the goals and values and power of the elite can change education.
There are a thousand questions about society which elite institutions will never raise but which are critical to our future. The revolutionary movement must consider anew the goals of human society and the measures of human achievement. It must re-examine our relationship to technology and to Nature. It must enable people to transform work and play into sources of creativity and fulfillment.
We do not have the power at this point to change education, but we can begin to pose these questions. The most liberating and humanly fulfilling education for all of us will come as we take part in the struggle to overthrow elite rule and recreate human society.
*Thanks to Bill Griffen for the H. Mann quote.
Another for “nonclassical” and others concerned about the fate of public education. In 1997 I was invited to make the keynote address to the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents Summer Institute. I think you’ll find it a prescient analysis of what was about to be done to eth schools.
SCHOOL REFORM AND THE ATTACK ON PUBLIC EDUCATION
by David G. Stratman
[newdemocracyworld.org]
…I have two propositions I would like to put to you. The first is that the official education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children. Its goal is:
–not to increase educational attainment but to reduce it;
–not to raise the hopes and expectations of our young people but to narrow them, stifle them, and crush them;
–not to improve public education but to destroy it.
My second proposition is that the education reform movement is part of a wider corporate and government plan to undermine democracy and strengthen corporate domination of our society.
What evidence do I have for these assertions? Let’s look first at the long-standing campaign to persuade the American people that public education has failed.
This has been a disinformation campaign based on fraudulent claims, distortions, and outright lies.
Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, there have been numerous reports issued, each declaring U.S. public education a disaster, and each proposing “solutions” to our problems. The sponsors of the many reports are a little like the con-man in “The Music Man,” who declares, “We’ve got trouble, right here in River City…” and the chorus repeats, “trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble…” He just happens to be selling the solution to all their troubles. How do you sell radical changes that would have been completely unacceptable to the public a decade or two ago? You tell people over and over that their institutions have failed, and that only the solutions you are peddling offer any way out of their “troubles.”
In the past couple of years, several excellent books have been published showing in detail that these claims are false. My purpose in this talk is not to cover the ground that these authors have already explored, but to answer the critical question: Why are the public schools under attack?
But let’s look just briefly at a couple of the key pieces of disinformation to which the American public has been subjected.
The supposed dramatic decline of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores was a fraud. These scores did decline somewhat over the period 1963 to 1977. But the SAT is a voluntary test. It is not representative of anything, and it is useless as a measure of student performance or of the quality of the schools. The scores began to fall modestly when the range of young people going into college dramatically expanded in the mid-sixties.
Did this mean that there was a lowering of student achievement during this period? Absolutely not. The Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, or PSAT, is a representative exam, given each year to sample student populations across the country. During the period in question, PSAT scores held absolutely steady.
Even more notable is the fact that scores on the College Board Achievement Tests–which test students not on some vaguely-defined “aptitude,” but on what they know of specific subjects-did not fall but rose slightly but consistently over the same period in which for the first time in the history of the United States or any other country, the sons and daughters of black and white working families were entering college in massive numbers.
Berliner and Biddle comment in their book, The Manufactured Crisis, “the real evidence indicates that the myth of achievement decline is not only false-it is a hysterical fraud.”
How different would have been the public’s understanding of what was happening in the schools if the media and the politicians had told the truth! How different if they had announced that, during the period of the greatest turmoil in American society since the Civil War, in which a higher proportion of young people were graduating high school and going on to college than ever before, at a rate unparalleled in any other country in the world, representative tests showed that overall aptitude and achievement were holding steady or increasing? How different would have been the history of these last decades for educators and parents and students-and for public education?
What about the claim that U.S. business has lost its competitive edge because of the alleged failure of public education? Anyone who has been watching the triumphal progress of American corporations in the world market in the last two decades or has watched the unprecedented returns on the stock market knows that these claims are preposterous. Let me cite a few specific facts here:
-U.S. workers are the most productive in the world. Workers in Japan and Germany are only 80% as productive; in France, 76% as productive; in the United Kingdom, 61% as productive.
-America leads the world in the percentage of its college graduates who obtain degrees in science or engineering, and this percentage has been steadily rising since 1971.
-Far from having a shortage of trained personnel, there is now in fact a glut of scientists and engineers in the U.S. The Boston Globe reported on 3/17/97 that , “At a time when overall unemployment has fallen to around 5%, high-level scientists have been experiencing double-digit unemployment.” The government estimates that America will have a surplus of over 1 million scientists and engineers by 2010, even if the present rate of production does not increase.
What explains the aggressive effort by corporate and government leaders to discredit public education?
To understand this, I believe we have to look beyond education to developments in the economy and the wider society. In the past decades, millions of jobs have been shipped overseas. Millions more have been lost to “restructuring” and “downsizing.” This trend is not likely to abate. The U. S. is presently enjoying its lowest official unemployment rate in decades-4.9%, or about 6.2 million unemployed at the peak of a long period of sustained growth. But even this large figure is deceptive, because it does not include the millions of people who have been reduced to temporary or part-time work, without benefits, without job security, and without hope of advancement. The number of “contingent” workers in 1993 was over 34 million.
The future for employment is even more grim. Computerization will eliminate millions of jobs and deskill millions more. This is, after all, the attraction of automation for corporations: it downgrades the skills required of most jobs, and thereby makes employees cheaper and more easily expendable. I was talking recently with a chemist who works at a major hospital in Boston. She expressed dissatisfaction with her job. She said that, when she began the job ten years ago, she actually did chemistry. Now, she says, her job has been reduced to tending a machine which performs chemical analyses. A friend of mine wrote a book on the effect of computerization on work. She interviewed a vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank who was a Loan Officer at the bank. He sat there smartly in his three-piece suit and complained that “He doesn’t really feel like a loan officer or a vice-president.” Why? Because, after he gets the information from the person requesting a loan, he punches it into a computer-which then tells him if he can make the loan or not.
The transformation of work through computers has really just begun. In his book, The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin estimates that “In the United States alone, in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines.” As Rifkin puts it, “Life as we know it is being altered in fundamental ways.”
Now, what does all this have to do with education?
There were two little incidents which happened to me in 1976-77, when I was an Education Policy Fellow working in the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, D.C., which gave me a clue as to how to understand the attack on education. The first was a conversation with a man who was at the time a very highly-placed federal official in education. He put to a few of us this question. He said, “In the coming decade of high unemployment”-referring here to the 1980s-“in the coming decade of high unemployment, which is better? Is it better to have people with a lot of education and more personal flexibility, but with high expectations? Or is it better to have people with less education and less personal flexibility, and with lower expectations?” The answer was that it was better to have people with less education and lower expectations. The reasoning was very simple. If people’s expectations are very high when the social reality of the jobs available is low, then there can be a great deal of anger and political turmoil. Better to lower their education and lower their expectations.
A second clue involved a man whom many of you may know. Ron Gister, who was Executive Director of the Connecticut School Boards Association at the time, began a speech in 1977 with this simple question. He said, “Ask yourself, What would happen if the public schools really succeeded?” What if our high schools and universities were graduating millions of young people, all of whom had done well?
In an economy with over 6 million unemployed by official count, in which millions more are underemployed or working part-time or in temporary jobs, in which many millions of jobs are being deskilled by computerization and many millions eliminated, and in which wages have fallen to 1958 levels, where would these successful graduates go? What would they do? If they had all graduated with As and Bs, they would have high expectations-expectations for satisfying jobs which would use their talents. Expectations for further education. Expectations about their right to participate in society and to have a real voice in its direction.
I think you can see that, for the people at the very top of this society, who have been instrumental in shipping jobs overseas and restructuring the workforce and downsizing the corporations and shifting the tax burden from the rich onto middle-class and working Americans-the class of people, in short, who have been planning and reaping the benefits of the restructuring of American society-for this class of people at the top, for the schools to succeed would be very dangerous indeed. How much better that the schools not succeed, so that, when young people end up with a boring or low-paying or insecure job or no job at all, they say, “I have only myself to blame.” How much better that they blame themselves instead of the economic system.
The reason that public education is under attack is this: our young people have more talent and intelligence and ability than the corporate system can ever use, and higher dreams and aspirations than it can ever fulfill. To force young people to accept less fulfilling lives in a more unequal, less democratic society, the expectations and self-confidence of millions of them must be crushed. Their expectations must be downsized and their sense of themselves restructured to fit into the new corporate order, in which a relative few reap the rewards of corporate success-defined in terms of huge salaries and incredible stock options-and the many lead diminished lives of poverty and insecurity.
If my analysis is correct, it means that you-public educators, every person in this room, and all the staff and colleagues you have worked with these many years-you are under attack not because you have failed -which is what the media and the politicians like to tell you. You are under attack because you have succeeded-in raising expectations which the corporate system cannot fulfill.
They are also attacking education for a second reason: Blaming public education is a way of blaming ordinary people for the increasing inequality in society. It is a way of blaming ordinary people for the terrible things that are happening to them. The corporate leaders and their politician friends are saying that, if our society is becoming more unequal, if millions don’t have adequate work or housing or health care, if we are imprisoning more of our population than any other country on earth, it is not because of our brutal and exploitative economic system and our atomized society and our disenfranchised population. No, they say, it is not our leaders or our system who are at fault. The fault lies with the people themselves, who could not make the grade, could not meet the standards. According to the corporate elite, the American people have been weighed in the balance, and they have been found wanting.
Where does the education reform movement fit in this picture?
My first experience with education reform came in September 1977, when I became Washington Director of the National PTA. It so happened that I began my job on the same day that Senators Daniel Moynihan and Robert Packwood and 51 co-sponsors filed the Tuition Tax Credit Act of 1977. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed giving the parents of children attending private schools a tax credit of up to $500 to cover tuition costs. The sponsors cited the SAT report as proof that the public schools were failing and that private schools needed support.
Like many others in the public school community, I saw tuition tax credits as a real threat. I met with representatives of the NEA, the AFT, AASA, and others, and we formed the National Coalition for Public Education to oppose tuition tax credits. Over the next several months we organized a coalition comprising over 80 organizations with some 70 million members.
The Tuition Tax Credit bill was a serious threat to public education. The entire federal budget for public elementary and secondary education at the time was about $13 billion. The Packwood-Moynihan bill would have taken about $6 billion from the public treasury. At the time, nearly 90% of our young people attended public schools. The Tuition Tax Credit Act proposed to give an amount equal to nearly half of all the federal moneys spent on the 90% of children in public school to the parents of the 10% of children attending private school.
Aside from its budgetary impact, the bill would have meant a reversal of the federal role in education. The historic role of the federal government has been to equalize educational opportunity. Tuition tax credits, since they are a credit against income and go chiefly to upper-income parents, would disequalize educational opportunity. Federal funding of private education would have established and given official sanction to a two-class system of education, separate and unequal.
The Tuition Tax Credit Act had enormous media and political support. It passed the House in May, 1978. We were able to stop it in the Senate only in August, 1978 with tremendous effort , and then by only one vote. Like the Tuition Tax Credit Act that started it all, the official education reforms such as school vouchers, charter schools, school choice, school-based management, raising “standards,” the increased use of standardized testing, the focus on “School to Work,” and other reforms, are calculated to make education more sharply stratified, more intensely competitive, and more unequal, and to lower the educational attainment of the great majority of young people. They are calculated also to fragment communities and undermine the web of social relationships which sustains society, and so to weaken people’s political power in every area of life.
Just look at some of the reforms:
PRIVATIZATION AND FRAGMENTATION: Public schools have historically been at the center of neighborhood and community life in the United States. In addition, the schools have been a public good which relies on the whole community for support and in which the whole community participates.
School vouchers, tuition tax credits, charter schools, and school choice attack community connections among people. They attack the idea of a public good and replace it with the competition of isolated individuals competing to achieve their own private interests. In this way, privatizing education or establishing separate charter schools will dramatically undermine the power of ordinary people to affect the direction of society.
Voucher and choice plans also legitimize greater inequality in America’s schools, as students with better connections or more self-confidence choose better schools. Who can argue with tracking students into good schools or poor schools when the students themselves have apparently chosen their fate?
School-based management is part of this trend. Though school-based management is usually touted as a way of “empowering” parents and teachers at the local level and of cutting back on the costs of central administration, its real purpose-aside from undermining the power of organized teachers–is to fragment school districts and communities, and further to disempower them. School-based management makes every school an island. It encourages people to think only about their own school and their own place within it.
RAISING STANDARDS: There is a world of difference between raising our “expectations” for students and raising “standards.” Raising our expectations means raising our belief in students’ ability to succeed and insuring that all the resources are there to see that they do. Raising standards means erecting new hoops for them to jump through.
For years Massachusetts has ranked just after Mississippi as the state with the greatest inequality among its school districts. Vast inequalities still remain among Massachusetts schools. Sharply raising standards while not equalizing resources at a common high level, and using “high stakes” tests as the engine of reform, is setting many thousands of children and many school districts up for failure.
Establishing a statewide core curriculum and curriculum frameworks can be very useful steps toward educational quality and equity. My limited conversations with teachers who have seen these frameworks in various disciplines, however, lead me to think that they are being established at unrealistic levels that will assure massive student failure.
INCREASING STANDARDIZED TESTING: The massive increase in standardized testing is exactly the wrong thing to do in our schools. At the very time when educators are calling for more “critical thinking” and “higher-order thinking skills,” teaching is increasingly being driven by standardized, norm-referenced, multiple-choice tests. The effect will be to narrow the curriculum and push teachers into teaching techniques geared toward memorization and rote learning. With more focus on norm-referenced testing, the content of education disappears, to become simply the “rank” of the individual student. The effect is to attack the relationships among students and force them into greater competition with one another. Education is more than ever reduced to a game of winners and losers.
LOWERING THE SCHOOL LEAVING AGE: Another thrust of such plans has been to encourage young people to leave school at an earlier age. In 1985 I was employed by the Minnesota Education Association to help design a strategy to defeat the reform plan proposed by the Minnesota Business Partnership. The Minnesota Business Partnership Plan was probably the most sophisticated education reform plan proposed in any state at the time. It proposed, among other things, moving from a K-12 to a K-10 system, and giving a “Certificate of Completion” to all students who successfully completed the tenth grade. Only a select group of students-projected to be about 20% -would then be invited back to complete grades 11 and 12. The clear effect would have been that a great many students would end their education at age 16.
What was the sense of this proposal? The Business Partnership claimed that the plan was designed to allow students greater “personal flexibility” and “choice.” In fact it had a quite different purpose. Minnesota at the time had the highest school retention rate in the country: fully 91% of Minnesota’s young people were graduating from high school, and a high proportion of these were proceeding on to college. By encouraging tens of thousands of young people to leave school at age 16, the Business Partnership-comprising some of the largest Minnesota corporations, like 3M, ConAgra, and Honeywell-would have created huge new pools of cheap labor in Minnesota, to work in stock yards and assembly plants and flip hamburgers.
The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 does not have exactly the same proposal, but the Massachusetts law moves in a similar direction. In 1998 Massachusetts will require that all students pass a “high stakes” test in the tenth grade to be eligible to graduate. At the same time, the schools will begin offering students a “certificate of competence” upon successful completion of the tenth grade curriculum. What will be the effect of the “high stakes” test, especially if dramatic steps are not taken to insure that the educational programs offered young people in many poorer or urban districts are dramatically improved? I suspect that many thousands of young people who would otherwise be graduating with a high school diploma will leave school instead with a “certificate of competence” after the tenth grade. (Only 48% of Chicago’s young people recently passed the new “high-stakes” test required for graduation.) I suggest to you that the effect of the high stakes 10th grade test will be to lower the school retention rate, and that it has the same purpose as the proposed Minnesota reform: to enlarge the pool of cheap labor, and to make it seem as if it is our young people and not our system that is failing.
You may be aware that in 1995 for the first time in our history the gap between black and white high school completion rates was closed: 87% of black and of white young people between the ages of 25 and 29 have completed high school. Also, in the years from 1978 to 1993, the average SAT scores of black students rose 55 points. Are we now prepared to abandon these young people and undo this great progress?
FOCUSING ON “SCHOOL TO WORK:” Beginning with A Nation At Risk, nearly all of the education reform plans have been couched in terms of one great national purpose: business competition. According to these plans, the great goal and measure of national and educational progress is how effectively U.S. corporations compete with Japanese and German corporations in the international marketplace.
I think that most educators-most people, in fact-are downright uncomfortable with the idea that the fulfillment of our human potential is best measured by the Gross National Product or the progress of Microsoft or General Motors stock on the Big Board.
In the 1950s, Charles Wilson, the former president of General Motors whom Eisenhower had appointed Secretary of Defense, declared, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” In the 1960s, however, millions of ordinary people became engaged in the civil rights and the anti-war movements and the rank-and-file labor movement. People began increasingly to question the role that the corporations play in American society and began to question the Gross National Product as the real goal and measure of democracy.
Now come the corporate education reformers to tell us that the goal of human development is the success of Big Business! The education reform movement is trying to reassert the moral authority of business as the guiding light of human society and corporate profit as the measure of human achievement.
On a more concrete level, the “School to Work” program aims to shape every child to meet the needs of the corporations. What kind of terrible power are we giving these corporations, what gods have they become, if now we should sacrifice our children to them?
Let me hasten to point out that there is much that is being done in the name of reform that is good, and I am sure that each of you has programs in his own district which you could point to as education reform in the best sense. Education reform has two faces. The goals of the official “reformers” are destructive. Public education in the U. S., however, is a huge enterprise, involving millions of students and teachers and administrators. There is no way that this huge undertaking can be changed without the active involvement of tens of thousands of educators and others. These people-people like you and me and your teaching staff and other educators-do not share the goals of the corporations. Far from it: we genuinely want children and schools to succeed. So the effect of the massive involvement of educators at the grassroots has been, to one extent or another, to push reform in a more positive direction. In fact, I believe that the appointment of John Silber as Chairman of the Board of Education was precisely to put a stop to popular involvement in education reform. Silber’s role is to put the genie of democratic education reform back in the bottle, so that the goals of the corporate reformers can be achieved.
It is important to see that the attack on public education does not stem from a “right-wing fringe,” as some writers have charged, but from the most powerful corporate and government interests in American society. Business groups at the national level and in most states have led the call for vouchers and charter schools and new standards. President Clinton himself has made Charter Schools the focus of his efforts in K-12 education, and has made tuition tax credits the focus of new aid for higher education.
The assault on public education is part of a wider strategy to strengthen corporate domination of American society.
In the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, at the time education was being greatly expanded, we experienced a “revolution of rising expectations,” as people’s ideas of what their lives should be like greatly expanded. These rising expectations threatened the freedom of elites in the U.S. and around to the world to control their societies. Beginning around 1972, both capitalist and communist elites undertook a counteroffensive, to lower expectations and to tighten their control. This counteroffensive took many different forms, all designed to undermine the economic and psychological security of ordinary people.
For example, the export of jobs and restructuring of corporations which have left many millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed did not happen by chance. They are government policies. Corporations were given tax incentives to move their operations overseas. The huge debts incurred in corporate buyouts were made tax deductible. The safety net of social programs instituted during the New Deal and Great Society was dismantled.
The gutting of these social programs was not a matter of fiscal necessity, as we were told, but of social control. David Stockman, while Budget Director for President Reagan, boasted that the Administration, by slashing taxes on corporations and the rich while vastly increasing military expenditures, had created a “strategic deficit” precisely in order to dismantle social programs. Why? Because programs such as food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and unemployment insurance make people less vulnerable to the power of the corporations. A succession of presidents, Republican and Democrat, has continued to cut the social safety net, to make people more frightened and controllable.
The current supposed “crisis” in Social Security is a case in point. There is nothing wrong with the Social Security system that a few adjustments-such as removing the upper limit on salaries that are taxed- could not fix. Yet the government and corporations have mounted a scare campaign similar to the attack on public education to suggest that the Social Security system is near collapse and cannot survive without radical “reform,” such as privatization. The goal is to make people feel insecure and vulnerable.
What changes are needed in public education? We know that public education has important problems. We do not claim that the schools are not in need of change. The problem, however, is that the changes being proposed move in the wrong direction. They exacerbate the worst thing about the public schools: their tendency to reinforce the inequality of American society.
At the heart of the public education system, there is a conflict over what goals it should pursue. On one side stand educators and parents and students, who wish to see students educated to the fullest of their ability. On the other side stand the corporate and government elite, the masters of great wealth and power. Their goal is not that students be educated to their fullest potential, but that students be sorted out and persuaded to accept their lot in life, whether it be the executive suite or the unemployment line, as fitting and just. The goal of this powerful elite for the public schools is that inequality in society be legitimized and their hold on power reinforced. This conflict is never acknowledged openly, and yet it finds its way into every debate over school funding and educational policy and practice, and every debate over education reform.
A key question for us is, “What are we educating our students for?” The choices, I think, come down to two. We can prepare students for unrewarding jobs in an increasingly unequal society, or we can prepare our young people to understand their world and to change it. The first is education to meet the needs of the corporate economy. The second is education for democracy.
The goal of the schools must be education for democracy. With this goal we would substitute high expectations for low, cooperation and equality for competition and hierarchy, and real commitment to our children for cynical manipulation. With the goal of education for democracy I believe we could build a reform movement that would truly answer the needs of our children and truly fulfill the goals that led us to become educators.
There is no time for me here to outline a program of positive education reforms, although I have listed ten possible principles of reform on a separate sheet.
Let me say in general, however, that the process of formulating positive reforms should begin with a far-reaching dialogue at the local and state levels, involving administrators, teachers, parents, and students, about the goals of education. This dialogue should examine present educational policy and practice to find what things contribute to self-confidence and growth and healthy connections among young people, and strengthen the relationships of schools to communities, and what things attack this self-confidence and growth and undermine these relationships. A similar dialogue should be organized in every community and at every school. It might include public hearings, at which parents and teachers and others are encouraged to state their views on appropriate goals for education, and to identify those things in their local school which support or retard these goals. Superintendents would have to be both leaders and careful listeners at such hearings.
What conclusions can we draw from this analysis? I suggest several:
One is that you as educators are under attack not because you have failed, but because you have succeeded.
A second is that you did not make a mistake, five or ten or twenty-five years ago, when you became an educator. The work you have been doing for all these years has made a tremendous contribution to our society, and you should be proud of it.
A third is that your job now is more important than ever, because you have a mission. Your mission is to play a leading role defending public education and forthrightly leading change for the better. Your role is to help lead the fight for education for democracy.
The theme of your Summer Institute is “Building Stable Institutions in an Unstable World.” The key to building stability in our public schools is threefold: understanding why they are under attack, understanding what is of value in them, and forging a direction for change.
What can we do, as superintendents and educators? I have a few suggestions:
1. M.A.S.S. should prepare superintendents to play a leading role in reversing the attack on public education, by establishing a standing committee responsible for planning a long-term, serious campaign; preparing a range of literature and other materials for use at the local level; and holding training and strategy sessions. The literature should explain the attack on public education: why it is happening, the role that the official education reforms play in this attack, and call for positive reforms. M.A.S.S. should organize discussions, perhaps using the Superintendents’ Round-tables or some other vehicle, for superintendents to compare their own experiences dealing with these issues.
2. The most important thing to do is to reach out to the community with information explaining the attack on public education. We should remember that the community begins with us–that is, with all the many people involved in public education: teachers, administrators, parents and students. If we can educate and mobilize this great community force, we can achieve a great deal.
3. We should, through dialogue with other educators and with parents and students, develop positive education reforms consistent with achieving education for democracy.
4. We should create local and statewide coalitions to expose the attack on public education and to change the direction of reform toward education for democracy. We should use Massachusetts as the base for a national movement for education for democracy.
We are called to a great purpose. We are called to build a movement capable of defending our institutions from corporate attack and capable too of transforming them, to lead them in a more democratic direction. We must build a movement to take back America from the corporate powers and the masters of great wealth, to place our country truly in the hands of the people.
We will not be alone in this battle. The great majority of people in our schools and in our communities share the same fundamental beliefs about what our schools should be like and what our society should be like. We can build upon shared values of commitment to each other and to future generations, and shared belief in democracy.
For most of the twentieth century, the people of the world have been trapped between capitalism and communism. Neither of these systems is democratic. Neither has held much promise for most people. Now communism has collapsed. I believe our task as we approach the end of the twentieth century is to create human society anew on a truly democratic basis, in which human beings are not reshaped and restructured to fit the needs of the economy, but rather social and economic structures are reshaped to allow the fulfillment of our full potential as human beings.
Thank you.
(newdemocracyworld.org)
Dave, thanks for your hard intelligent work. But one more giant fraud.
Ask William K. Black to investigate this fraud, within the larger frame of comprehensive fraud designed to RUIN our government of/by/for the People.
Thanks Dave for this eye-opening and inspiring work. The more we define the enemy, the less power they have, and they certainly are our enemy. Not because we chose them as targets, but because they target us, through their elitist, jaundiced world-view. The lack of imagination of those who rise to the top in our society is often stunning.
Nice, Dave…thanks…I am chagrined corporate media gets away with defining
“educational opportunity” as “economic opportunity”, but am well aware of abstract nature of word-thought-meaning…I see this as wholly intentional..
not in any way accidental.
For example (for all your hard work) the word “BE” is derivative of the word,
“BEhavior”…to BE is to BEhave.
We abstractly can formulate humans can BEhave “rationally”..an abstract if there ever was one. First must come rational behavior…
Asian languages are pictures of an actual action..much less such problem…
An existential philosophy prof was once beating up a class-“Does the tree falling in the forest make a noise if noone is there to hear?”…he took one side, then the other…until I began to laugh..(sitting in on class).
He stopped, stated, “I’m glad we could entertain you…what do you find so funny?”
I stammered (from somewhere), “I’m not god…”!
He smiled, looking around at class, “We’re all glad to hear that…” (laughter)..
I stammered a bit more confidently, “Soooo….I can’t tell if anyone else is listening…” (end of discussion=human limitations of perception, as well as language)..
P.S.-for Dave-
I’m involved in this on a daily basis-Washington State education, teachers, unions, are being attacked daily by “Kitsap Sun” local fundamentalist media..
the attempt to privatize public infra$tructure, to turn over building$, bu$$e$,
in$tructor$ to taxpayer $ub$idized private profit$…$capegoating them for economic de$truction by Wall $treet…
in actuality, (and I say this often), blaming the RAPE VICTIM for the RAPE…
Excellent post and video, thank you.
Comments thread sucked. As Jack Johnson sang, where’d all the good people go?
Franklin, I couldn’t agree more — on the post, the video, and the comments…with just a few exceptions, including YOURS.
Why should we listen to the Indignados? They failed.
I didn’t know the crystal ball was real!