The four horsemen of our apocalypse?

Racism, Poverty, Militarism, Materialism. The apocalypse reference may sound dramatic, but the current condition (and trajectory) of our society is looking pretty bad.

Cornel West reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King in his piece for the New York Times today, “Dr. King Weeps From His Grave.” Excerpts with my emphasis added:*

...[during the last years of his life] King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.”...

MILITARISM is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians) [our war history is HERE]. MATERIALISM is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.[e.g. see HERE]

RACISM is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration [more on Alexander HERE and HERE]. And POVERTY is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people...[see HERE and HERE]

...the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule...**

Released nearly 29 years ago, Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” launched the war against public education. Richard Rothstein wrote this in 2008 (“A Nation at Risk” Twenty-Five Years Later): 

In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good.

The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning...(READ THE REST!)

The educational “crisis” is propaganda whipped up in order to embed a specific mindset into Americans. That propaganda manipulates public concerns and supplies the justification for why our universal public education system should be dismantled and metamorphosized into one which is more restrictive and privatized. Even a report released in 1990 (Sandia Report) was suppressed to prevent the "crisis" premise from being challenged. From “Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report”(2007)

What "A Nation at Risk" claimed in 1983

• American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.
• American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.
• SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980.
• Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.
• Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.

What the Sandia Report revealed in 1990

• Between 1975 and 1988, average SAT scores went up or held steady for every student subgroup.
• Between 1977 and 1988, math proficiency among seventeen-year-olds improved slightly for whites, notably for minorities.
• Between 1971 and 1988, reading skills among all student subgroups held steady or improved.
• Between 1977 and 1988, in science, the number of seventeen-year-olds at or above basic competency levels stayed the same or improved slightly.
• Between 1970 and 1988, the number of twenty-two-year-old Americans with bachelor degrees increased every year; the United States led all developed nations in 1988.

In other words, there is no "educational crisis" in this country, but there is plenty of racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. The ed reform movement is a con.

* Did the NY Times change Cornel West's original title because it was too provocative? See what's embedded in the article's link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

** Not terribly keyed into politics until the past several years, it took observing how President Obama has functioned (Arne Duncan and school privatizing pals, the friendliness to Goldman Sachs and others, even the choice of the purebred Bo, etc.) to demonstrate this oh-so-clearly to me. This morning I got a phone call from Obama 2012 and let the caller know why I've withdrawn my support. 

Who’s right: Arne or Michelle [Alexander]?

Arne Duncan: “I believe education is THE civil rights issue of our generation, the only sure pathway out of poverty, and the only way to achieve a more equal and just society.” (Facebook, Info page on May 20, 2010)

Michelle Alexander: “I believe that the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time. And that it is a tragedy of as great proportions as Jim Crow was in its time.” (Bill Moyers Journal interview, April 2, 2010) [SEE THE CHART BELOW!]

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BIOs

Arne Duncan (b. 1964) earned a bachelors degree in sociology from Harvard then played professional basketball in Australia for four years. He returned to the U.S. where investment manager John Rogers employed Duncan to run Rogers' new non-profit education foundation (Ariel Education Initiative). Duncan eventually also sat on a number of non-profit boards and was also “on a team that later started a new public [charter] elementary school.” John Rogers and Duncan had attended the same private school in Chicago and were longtime basketball buddies. Duncan started working for Chicago Public Schools in 1999 – first as Deputy Chief of Staff for CEO Paul Vallas, then as its CEO. He became U.S. Secretary of Education in 2009. Duncan credits his childhood experience of spending afternoons in his mother's inner-city tutoring program “with shaping his understanding of the challenges of urban education.”

Michelle Alexander (b. 1968 approx.) is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. Following law school, she clerked for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the United States Supreme Court, and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty, where she served as Director of the Civil Rights Clinic. She joined the Ohio State University faculty in 2005 and now holds a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Her recently released book is “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Which mind has processed the issues more, Arne's or Michelle's? For my money, I’m going with Michelle Alexander, whose message is absolutely chilling, and totally correct. Arne Duncan is an intellectual lightweight who has embraced repetition of the favored mantras of the ed deform crowd.

Consider the following facts:

1. Since 1957, the proportion of the African American population with a high school degree has increased by 300% (18.4% to 79.2%) and the proportion of the African American population with a 4-year college degree increased by almost 500% (2.9% to 17.2%). Data is from the April 2004 Kirwan Institute PowerPoint report “Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today.”

2. Even with the significant increase in educational attainment mentioned above, African American unemployment has consistently been about twice as high as white unemployment, at least since the 1950s. What gives with that!? [See the chart below]

3. What's worse is that the number of incarcerated African Americans has increased 800% since the 1950s! Despite only small fluctuations in the violent crime rate in the past 35 years, we’ve gone from 300,000 people in jails and prisons in 1972 -- to 2.3 million today, with an additional 5 million on probation and parole. A grossly disproportionate number of the incarcerated have been people of color. Families and communities have been devastated.

4. We are the worldwide incarceration champions. The U.S. is #1 in the number of prisoners per capita at 715 people per 100,000. To put this in perspective, Russia is #2 at 584, Canada is #73 at 116, and Japan is #126 at 54.

So that's what Michelle Alexander is talking about.

What is problematic for the United States of America is not our public schools and school teachers. THE problem is that our national character has some major flaws.

And now that the men are in jail and/or unemployed and families are in continual chaos, and now that neighborhood schools have been utterly neglected for years, are popularly called "failures," and are being 'innovatively disrupted' by the ed deformers, the state is going after the mothers and grandmothers: 

Calif. bill could jail parents if kids miss school (Fresno Bee, May 13, 2010)*

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The state of California would hold parents responsible if their children are chronically truant under a bill the state Senate approved Thursday.

The bill would let prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine if their kids miss too much school. Judges could delay the punishment to parents as an incentive to get their children to class.

It applies only to parents or guardians of children age 6 or older in kindergarten through eighth grade. Prosecutors would have to prove the parents failed to reasonably supervise and encourage the student to attend school...

This tough love idea will be sure to affect low-income African American women disproportionately, but given our compulsion to incarcerate people of color, it makes perfect sense.

These are other things to consider:

• People in this country chose to disinvest in urban public education long ago.
• They/we chose to tolerate high and chronic unemployment in urban minority communities.
• They/we chose to corner inner-city residents into needing to resort to an underground economy.
• They/we chose to adopt policies that would incarcerate huge numbers of African American men.
• They/we chose to turn the other way when the tradition of marriages and two-parent families in these communities started heading to extinction.

So any failures of the schools are BECAUSE of the consequences of these other things. Our domestic problems were never caused by the schools, and our schools never be able to fix them.

*If they can lock up the moms for this offense, shouldn't they also be locking up some of the crooks from Goldman Sachs?

ADDED ON JANUARY 27, 2010: PLEASE SEE THESE RELATED PERIMETER PRIMATE POSTS

• Where Sociology, Criminology, and Charter Schools Converge
• Last night’s stunning Bill Moyers Journal : Part One featured Bill Moyers’ interview with Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander. Part Two was Moyers’ essay on the growing income inequality.
• A Real Crisis

When looking at the "Prison Admissions by Race" graph below, please note that the figures indicate in numbers, not percentages. And be aware that the African American population in 1930 was about one tenth (1/10) the size of the White population. In 1997 it was about one sixth (1/6).

Last night’s stunning Bill Moyers Journal

There were two segments on the April 2^nd program. Please take time to watch them or read the transcripts.

Part One featured Bill Moyers’ interview with Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander. Part Two was Moyers’ essay on the growing income inequality.

Thank you, Bill Moyers.

Excerpts from Part One:

BILL MOYERS: With me now is Bryan Stevenson, one of the country's leading advocates for justice. He lives in Alabama, where he founded and leads the Equal Justice Initiative, whose mission is defending the poor and people of color. He's won wide recognition, including the MacArthur "genius" award, for his efforts to end the death penalty. He teaches clinical law at New York University.

Michelle Alexander is also an expert in civil rights advocacy and litigation. The former director of the civil rights clinics at Stanford Law School in California, she teaches law now at Ohio State University. You're going to hear a lot about her powerful new book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”…

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: …individual black achievement today masks a disturbing, underlying racial reality. You know, to a significant extent, you know, affirmative action, seeing African Americans, you know, go to Harvard and Yale, become CEOs and corporate lawyers, you know, causes us all to marvel what a long way we have come.

But, you know, as Bryan just indicated, much of the data indicates that African Americans today, as a group, are not much better off than they were back in 1968. When Martin Luther King delivered his, you know, "The Other America" speech. Talking about how there are two Americas in the United States…

BRYAN STEVENSON: Other countries that have confronted historic problems of racism and gross ethnic conflict have recognized that to overcome that, there has to be a period of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, they had to go through truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, there had to be truth and reconciliation. In this country, we've never had truth and we've never had reconciliation. And so, the day to day reality for the clients where I work, the people I work with is one that's still hurt, angry, broken…

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, you know, just a couple decades after the collapse of the old Jim Crow system, a new system of racial control emerged in the United States. Today, people of color are targeted by law enforcement for relatively minor, nonviolent, often drug-related offenses. The types of crimes that occur all the time on college campuses, where drug use is open and notorious. That occur in middle class suburban communities without much notice, right?

Targeted, often at very young ages, for these relatively minor offenses. Arrested, branded felons, and then ushered into a parallel social universe, in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in many of the ways in which African Americans were discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

So, when I say that we have a new racial caste system, what I mean is that we have a system of laws, policies, and practices in the United States today that operate to lock people of color, particularly poor people of color, living in ghetto communities, in an inferior second-class status for life. Now, most people think the drug war was declared in response to rising drug crime or crime rates.

But that is not the case. The current drug war was, you know, was officially declared by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. A couple years before crack hit the streets and became a media sensation…

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: The drug war was part of the Republican Party's kind of grand strategy, now known as the Southern strategy, to use racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare in order to appeal to poor and working class white voters who were resentful of and disaffected by many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

Folks who were upset by bussing. Desegregation and affirmative action. The Republican Party strategists, you know, openly talked about the need to use racially-coded political appeals on crime and welfare in order to get those voters who used to be part of the Democratic New Deal coalition, to get those folks to defect to the Republican Party.

BILL MOYERS: You have a quote in your book from President Richard Nixon's White House Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman: "The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."…

Here’s a previous P.P. post about Michelle Alexander’s work.

Excerpts from Part Two:

BILL MOYERS: As we just heard, we have a long way to go to fulfill the dream of a multi-racial democracy, with equal justice and opportunity for all. Our Declaration of Independence spoke eloquently of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable rights, but those rights did not extend to slaves. Abraham Lincoln, the "Great Emancipator," may have been the first of our leaders fully to grasp the meaning of the American promise. In this small but significant book, "The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth," the economist Norton Garfinkle writes that Lincoln believed this country's defining characteristic was economic opportunity. He believed that through hard work, over the course of a lifetime, every American -- including black people --could achieve a decent standard of living.

In Garfinkle's words, "America was the first nation on earth to offer this opportunity of economic advancement to all, even to the humblest beginner, and this was what made the nation unique and worth preserving. Ultimately, it was the largest reason for Lincoln's willingness to fight the Civil War."

In our time, this idea of universal opportunity is once again under assault for working people of every race.

Even before the Great Collapse of '08 destroyed the value of their homes, robbed their pensions, and took their jobs, American families were slipping behind, and are worse off now than they were thirty years ago. Over these past three decades, workers actually increased their productivity but did not share proportionately in the rewards of their labor. Those went largely to the top.

Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, the incomes of people at the top have doubled while those in the middle and at the bottom have remained flat.

Let me throw some more statistics at you. You'll find their sources at our site online. Keep in mind that each of these numbers represents lived human experience.

In this richest of countries, more than 40 million people are living in poverty.

At some point in their childhoods, half of America's children will use food stamps to eat.

Some 30 million workers are unemployed or under-employed, and for those still working, the median wage today is about $32 thousand a year, which is why so many people are working two jobs trying to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, as the economist Robert Reich recently reminded us, in the 1950's and 60's, the CEO's of major American companies took home about 25 to 30 times the wages of the typical worker. By 1980 the big company CEO took home roughly 40 times the worker's wage. By 1990, it was 100 times. And by 2007, executives at the largest American companies received about 350 times the pay of the average employee. In many of the top corporations, the chief executive earns more every day than the average worker gets paid in a year.

And then there's the financial world. Case in point: Ken Lewis, who at the end of 2009 retired as CEO of Bank of America. Only recently did we learn that, not long after his company received $45 billion in taxpayer dollars from the big bailout, Lewis raked in more than $73 million in pension benefits and stock, and was given an insurance policy worth $10 million to his beneficiaries.

But compared to some people, Ken Lewis is a piker. Hedge fund managers, who bet that taxpayers -- you -- would pay to keep the banks from collapsing, hit the jackpot. Last year, one of them alone made a cool four billion dollars. The top 25 scooped up a total of 25.3 billion.

Dear America, Something is terribly wrong and it’s time for you to wake up.

Bullying or witch hunt?

The extreme amount of hatred and venom being hurled at public school teachers these days has got to be some sort of misdirected expression of the deluded people who still think that all things are possible for all people in this country. Or, is it the result of manipulation by those who are fully aware of what is going on and decided to toss in a red herring?

This country’s social mobility has pretty much hit the wall and we are entering uncharted territory. The empire is in decline. The citizenry knows that things aren’t right, but still haven't completely computed it. They don’t know what else to do other than to join in the fun of blaming a whole class of workers.

Mind you, I am not a teacher and I don't belong to a union. I am a longtime urban public school parent observer who is monitoring events and sensing that something evil is afoot.

Diane Ravitch recently wrote:

Did you see Newsweek last week? What a stunning and uninformed attack on teachers and teachers' unions. The cover of the magazine told the story: The Key to Saving American Education, by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert. It was printed on a classroom blackboard. In the background, on the same blackboard, was the handwritten phrase, repeated again and again, "We must fire bad teachers."

The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation's classrooms are overrun with "bad teachers," pedophiles, "weak" teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have "lifetime tenure." Evil teachers' unions protect these people who are harming our nation's children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.

I submit to you that teachers have been targeted because their work symbolizes our nation’s uncertain future. It is easy to attack the nurturers and caregivers of our children because they are fairly ineffective with defending themselves and with retaliating against the attacks. Stressed public school teachers are too busy working on the daily tasks of trying to make 25-35 kids focus on class work and behave right, and at the end of the school day, their energy is drained. Add to that the fact that, these days, the teachers are increasingly demoralized. I believe this demoralization is one of the primary goals because it produces emotional breakdown and powerlessness.

It would be much harder for people to go after the higher status entities that function with an aggressive, masculine nature, like the business, legal, or warrior classes. What else explains why the nation’s response to what Goldman Sachs did (and is still doing) to us has been so muted?

So why go after the teachers? Because they’re easy targets and bullying is an adrenaline rush. It's also easier to bully and blame than to deal with the deeper, societal issues that eat away at this country.

The nasty scapegoating mentality is best revealed by the “no excuses” rhetoric. But the fact is that we will never be a society where everyone gets a college degree, where people at higher positions on the social ladder willingly sacrifice their spot to someone else, and where the poor and the less fortunate don’t exist.

As for the scene in urban areas, Michelle Alexander (author of “The New Jim Crow”) is telling the difficult-to-hear-truth: America now has a permanent under-caste. She writes:

Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole -- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste -- not class, caste -- permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Think any of this might impact the academic achievement of the children born into this caste? Of course, you will never hear anything significant about this theme acknowledged or uttered by the people now setting education policy and pushing for "reform." That such a stark admission is missing is either by intentional neglect, or because their heads are buried in the sand.

Either way, this country's approach is very dangerous stuff. It's a bit difficult to bring this up out loud, but is anyone else getting that slight sense that fascism and/or thoughts of genocide are lurking in the wings?

Of related interest is the commentary by James Boyd White (link found in this post). See also, A Real Crisis.

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Added 3/18/2010

Watch this interview with Michelle Alexander here (part 1) and here (part 2).

Bob Herbert (3/12/2010) wrote about Bloomberg's NYC "stop and frisk" policy:

...Blacks and Hispanics, and especially those who are young and those who are poor, are disproportionately singled-out for this peculiar form of police harassment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and other top leaders in this town would never tolerate this kind of systematic abuse of middle-class or wealthy, white New Yorkers.

The overwhelming majority of the stops yield no law-enforcement benefit whatsoever. An analysis of the stops in the first three quarters of 2009 showed that contraband, which usually means drugs, was found on just 1.6 percent of the blacks who were stopped, 1.5 percent of the Hispanics, and 2.2 percent of the whites (who are stopped far less often than the other groups).