“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You build a factory out there – good for you.
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for...
Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
…Why aren't the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?
One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we're living in a time of growing income inequality, [Paul] Krugman told me, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is." The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: "Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time." The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke…
The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation's net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or "top quintile") account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation's wealth…
Americans' ignorance about wealth (and, probably, income) distribution is encouraging in the sense that it offers hope that most voters might opt for government policies more conducive to equality if only they knew how unequal things were…
The dramatic rise in income inequality started about 30 years ago. This timing coincides with the rise of this current free-market style of public education reform which started after the 1983 A Nation at Risk.
Whether they are billionaire and millionaire "philanthropists", hedge fund managers, or Ivy League-trained others (the zealot TFA-crowd), the people who drive and support the "reform" are typically from the small group which is accumulating more and more of this nation’s wealth. They shun public schools for their own children, but that doesn't stop them from being obsessed with dramatically transforming and weakening the public school system used by everyone else.
What's going on is a power grab. This "reform" group supports the elimination of local control via elected school boards, the reduction of expenditures on public education and social services, the dismantling of teachers unions, an increase in the number of publicly-funded private schools (vouchers and charter schools), the increased spending on testing and associated services and products, the implementation of an agenda that forces 18-year olds into lifelong debt (see “Top Ramen For Life: The Student Loan Crisis”), etc. This group spreads propaganda (and HERE) and actively suppresses opposition.
The evidence is everywhere that our nation is shifting to a plutocracy. As for education, South Bronx Teacher is correct when he says, "Apathy and ignorance of what is going on with education today will ultimately be our undoing."
1. Schwarzenegger leads the way with selling off California’s assets and removes those who question him from his path. This is neoliberalism in its true form: the transfer of wealth belonging to the masses (the State) into the hands of a small number of private individuals. Read this article carefully to absorb what is happening here. A local version of this would be if OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) sold its properties off, then turned around to rent back its schools from those new landlords in perpetuity.
2. Schwarzenegger professes his love and admiration for Milton Friedman: economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, Mr. Free-Market, and the neoliberal creator of all this mess. The movement to privatize public education started during the Reagan years.
3. In “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” Naomi Klein explains all. It’s happening fast and furious now. And never forget that it was the same extreme free-market faction that originally caused our current economic decline, enabling some of their players to make astronomical profits. The book is meaty, and I bet the forces are keeping their fingers crossed that not enough Americans have the stamina to read it.
The Schwarzenegger administration has removed appointees from two oversight bodies that must sign off on its plan to sell California state office buildings, replacing potential critics of the move with people who support it.
The appointees—to building authorities in San Francisco and Los Angeles—were replaced quietly in recent weeks as the state began taking bids on the properties, and their removal likely quashes any dissent or independent financial studies that might have emerged as the property sales move forward.
In both cases, the replaced board members had questioned whether the administration's plan is in the best long-term interests of California taxpayers.
Last month, the administration removed two longtime appointees on the San Francisco State Building Authority, just days before the panel was scheduled to review the sale of the San Francisco Civic Center.
It is one of about a dozen properties the state has put up for sale in an attempt to raise money to help close the state's budget deficit. The sell-off was championed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and approved by the Legislature as part of last year's budget package.
Two more appointees revealed this week that they had been removed from the Los Angeles State Building Authority for asking questions about Schwarzenegger's plan. Marina del Ray developer Jerry B. Epstein told The Associated Press that he had asked the state for a cost-benefit analysis of the plan.
Specifically, he wanted to compare the projected proceeds from the sell-off to the long-term cost of having to rent the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles. The building is scheduled to be paid off next year.
Instead, Epstein and retired real estate investment manager Rusty Doms received a two-sentence letter from the Schwarzenegger appointee who runs the state Department of General Services saying they were being replaced.
"It's the first time in over 60 years that I've ever been fired," said Epstein, 86, who has served as president of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners and as chairman of the California Transportation Commission.
He announced the move earlier in the week in an op-ed column he wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
Schwarzenegger's office referred inquiries on the issue to the Department of General Services. Department spokesman Jeffrey Young said the agency simply felt it was time to change appointments to bring in fresh ideas that were "more in tune with DGS's efforts and philosophies and strategies."
"We didn't fire them," he said.
Other cash-strapped states, including Arizona and Connecticut, also are attempting to sell state assets, but California's offering is by far the largest.
The budget bill that gave Schwarzenegger the authority to pursue the sale of state office buildings passed the Legislature last July. The legislation allowed Schwarzenegger to put 11 state properties containing more than a dozen buildings up for sale as a way to raise cash to shrink the budget deficit.
In addition to the Reagan building in Los Angeles and the Civic Center in San Francisco, the properties include the California Public Utilities Commission building in San Francisco and buildings in Sacramento that house the attorney general's office and state Franchise Tax Board.
Real estate firm CB Richard Ellis won the contract to manage the sale and in February began taking offers on the so-called "Golden State Portfolio."
State officials hope the properties will sell for about $2 billion total, but the net amount that will go to the state's general fund will be far less. After paying off the various construction bonds, the state expects to be left with $660 million, which would cover only about 3 percent of California's $20 billion deficit.
"It's like getting a pail of water to help the Titanic not sink," Epstein said.
Epstein and former San Francisco State Building Authority member Don Casper questioned whether the sell-off is in the best interest of taxpayers, especially since many of the buildings would be paid off in less than 10 years, meaning the state would own them free and clear.
The little-known building authorities oversee the state-owned properties in Los Angeles and San Francisco and must sign off on the plan before they can be sold. The Los Angeles authority is scheduled to meet April 15 to elect new authority members.
They were established three decades ago after the state decided that owning its government buildings was a smarter, long-term financial decision than being subject to annual rent increases. Then-Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican, signed off on the plan as a way to save money and consolidate state offices.
Schwarzenegger's plan marks a return to the days when California taxpayers were beholden to landlords.
"It's a reverse mortgage, because at the end of the day, the state will no longer own the buildings. That means the state will be paying rent forever," Casper said in an interview.
Under the administration's plan, California would sell the buildings and enter 20-year leases with the new owners, who could impose rent increases every five years.
Experts in commercial real estate earlier told the AP that trying to sell such properties in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression was folly, ensuring that the state would not get full value.
The first attempt seems to support that logic. Last month, the Schwarzenegger administration rejected all seven bids for the state-owned Orange County Fairgrounds because they came in too low. State officials initially projected they could get between $96 million and $180 million for the Costa Mesa property, but the highest bid came was $56 million.
The recent moves by the Schwarzenegger administration had the effect of silencing dissenting voices.
Mike DeNunzio, a Republican from San Francisco, said he replaced Stan Moy as president of the San Francisco State Building Authority after being vetted by the governor's office. Moy did not return a telephone message seeking comment.
DeNunzio said it was right for the governor to remove Casper, who told the San Francisco Weekly that he had concerns about turning the California Supreme Court into tenants of a commercial enterprise. The court is housed at the Civic Center, one of the properties to be sold.
"With all due respect, Don is the one who made the fuss," said DeNunzio, who said he assured administration officials that he supported their plan. "He concluded whatever the reason, his concern or financial judgment, he would oppose this—and that was not his role. It was beyond his purview."
Casper and Epstein disagree, saying they were acting in the best interest of the public in raising questions about the sell-off.
"It just doesn't make economic sense," Epstein said.
“Maria and I were so sad to hear about Milton Friedman’s death. Milton and his wife Rose, I have said many times, were not only my dear friends. They have been heroes to me for much of my life.
“Milton was one of the great thinkers and economists of the 20th Century, and when I was first exposed to his powerful writings about money, free markets and individual freedom, it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt.
“I wound up giving copies of his books and ‘Free to Choose’ videos to hundreds of my friends and acquaintances, and later I was lucky enough to meet the Friedmans and we became fast friends.
“A much-beloved Nobel Prize winner and advisor to three presidents and leaders around the world, Milton was kind enough to serve on my Council of Economic Advisors. He was a constant source of inspiration and insight.
“The world has lost a true giant, a tireless advocate for freedom, and I have lost a great friend. Our thoughts and prayers go to Rose and the rest of the Friedman family.”
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3. “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” by Naomi Klein. Klein might well argue that the situations which arise and compel the government to unload their assets are in fact manufactured by the pro-privatization forces themselves.
"The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today."
- 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.
- In the mid-1950s, 36% of the United States labor force was unionized.
- By 1980, the big company CEO took home roughly 40 times the worker’s wage.
- By 1989, the unionized United States labor force had dropped to about 16%.
- By 1990, the big company CEO took home roughly 100 times the worker’s wage.
- By 2000, only 13% of our labor force was unionized.
-By 2007, executives at the largest American companies received about 350 times the pay of the average employee.
-The United States is now one of the most economically stratified societies in the western world. A 2008 study found that the top .01% — or 14,000 American families — hold 22.2% of wealth. The bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, control just 4% of the nation’s wealth.
PS: Prop 16 is more of the same. PG&E (private company) concocted the ballot initiative to undercut competition from municipal (state-owned) power agencies. The proposition will require that any attempt to have electric service supplied by a public entity must be voted on by the public, and will require a Two Thirds majority to pass. Basically the proposition outlaws future public power (or community controlled power) in California. PG&E is almost the sole financial support for the proposition.
But, I suppose none of this is any matter. Everyone can now go back to watch “Dancing with the Stars"...
There were two segments on the April 2nd 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."…
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.
More interpersonal nastiness than usual, and the increased burden of expensive and time-consuming marketing tasks, are the human costs that school choice and competition have brought to real people in communities. This business-model practice helps to disintegrate intact, positive, community relationships which have been built up over time. I have yet to see how the milieu of increased competition between parents and schools is helping any children.
For families and their kids who have been in elementary school together and have established themselves as a community, the looming decision about middle school pits them against one another and breaks them up into factions. This happens in as early as the fourth and fifth grades, and again a few years later when middle-school families are under pressure to make their high school decision.
During the process, an unspoken-about tension builds up between parents and kids. People who once were collaborators on the same “team” increasingly find themselves judging each other. They repeatedly justify and emotionally defend their decisions, to both themselves and to each other. Parents and kids start to break their ties and actually become opponents who start sniffing each other out.
Carrying through with the harsh judging they’ve learned at home, students might even insult the schools their classmates have chosen. For instance, one day my 10-year-old daughter came home from school and worriedly reported to me that one of her classmates (who knew he would be going to a private middle school) had told her that she was "going to get beat up" at the public middle school we had chosen. The subtle and not-so-subtle judging of one another happens again in the seventh and eighth grade.
Another nasty side effect of school choice is that schools now have to "sell" themselves. School choice appeared in my district, but the already resource-poor traditional public schools weren't provided with any extra resources to meet the added demands of increased promotion and marketing. I'm talking about things like Web site management, brochures, newspaper ads, school tours, information nights and other events.
In the fall hunting season, prospective parents and kids visit the school for a tour during the school day. A set of teachers and administrators now have to take time away from their work to do "the sell." There is a heightened expectation for staff to work extra hours in the evening so they can pitch their school at parent meetings at feeder schools for multiple times. And the pressure is even on for school staff and parent representatives to make visits to potential smaller feeders during the school day.
All of this activity adds up to a lot of time and energy exclusively spent on the sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Of course, this is the business model, where what is sold is less important that how much of it can be sold. And in order to survive, some public schools have essentially been forced into hiring marketing firms!
Schools do the best they can knowing that how they present themselves during this time means everything to the future well-being of the school. Some schools have parents who pick up the pieces with much of the marketing, only because they want to make their school attractive to other strong parents in the community. So the schools with the most skilled and hard-marketing parents are able to generate a greater amount of interest.
In the urban setting where there is a dearth of middle class parents, many of the schools want to acquire as many of the middle class and more-discriminating low income parents as possible. They know that the higher caliber parents usually produce children of a higher academic and behavioral caliber, so acquiring those families will affect the school in a positive way for many years.
And always present, when parents encounter other parents at the grocery store with whom they once had a relaxed relationship with in elementary school, is that silent sizing up of one another. "How's Bret Harte going for you?" "How does Johnny like Tech?" Both the questions and responses, verbal and non-verbal, are emotionally loaded.
People don't openly talk about the schadenfreude they feel when something negative about someone else's school has appeared in the news, or when they learn that some kid isn't doing so well at one of the competitor schools. People don’t openly talk about how their feelings of insecurity and envy get triggered when they hear something exceptionally positive going on at a school they hadn’t chosen. No one talks much about the grieving and sadness caused by all this competition-produced divisiveness.
You can bet that the people pushing this disruptive business model on families in fragile communities wouldn't permit their own families and kids to be subjected to it.
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.
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?
...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).
The accurate term for the highly manipulative spending which Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family are engaging in is “predatory pseudo-philanthropy.” It is the logically evolved and naturally-conceived outcome of the predatory capitalist approach of these billionaire CEOs.
With predatory pseudo-philanthropy, non-profit foundations are set up to operate as vehicles with which the CEOs can acquire control of public institutions. It is these foundations which allow them to maneuver their power, and permit them to exert great influence and take possession of the functioning at the top levels, all under the guise of some sort of "generosity" to chronically under-funded, urban public school systems.
In the realm of public education, the foundations make tremendous “gifts” of money and personnel to school institutions (at local, state, and federal levels). The “giving” is their pathway to control. Foundations admit this goal outright and call it "venture philanthropy." The unsuspecting American public has been fooled into believing these astronomically wealthy individuals are simply being nice and are incapable of doing any wrong. What the American public believes is wrong.
All this reminds me of a friend who was repeatedly sexually abused by her father when she was a girl. As a woman she still could not throw out the beautiful riding saddle he had given her -- even though its presence repulsed her. As a child she had loved riding horses, and his "gift" made it easier for him to get what he wanted from her. Such is the essence of pure manipulation.
"The guiding philosophy for this particular form of capitalism [the one promoted by Milton Friedman] is an uncompromising belief in the privatization of resources, the granting of unfettered powers to corporate executives, and the encouragement of debt so extreme that it results in contemporary modes of enslavement – for countries and individuals alike.
Based on the assumption that the CEOs running our most powerful corporations constitute a special class of royalty who, unlike normal people, do not need to be governed by regulations, it totally altered geopolitics."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"We have accepted the cancer, the predatory mutant virus of capitalism, as the norm."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"It is a system that evolved through the subterfuge and economic cunning of people who freely move back and forth between corporations and the U.S. government (collectively, the corporatocracy)."
On the model’s policies and techniques:
"…the abandonment of laws that force corporations to adhere to strict environmental, social, truth-in-advertising, and other standards that protect the rights of the general populace; assumption of larger amounts of personal, corporate, and governmental debt; privatization of utilities, prisons, and other “public” institutions; increased police surveillance under the guise of “homeland security”; and the use of public lands to serve corporate interests."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Members of the corporatocracy are a, “… club of CEO powerbrokers of business and finance who dine with the like of senators, members of congress, regulators, and presidents [and others]."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"The ruling elites—the members of the corporatocracy, “… are not chosen by the people, do not serve limited terms, and answer to no one…They wield tremendous influence in the halls of both local and national governments. Almost no politician gets elected without money that flows through them and their stockholders. They control the mainstream media, either through direct ownership or advertising budgets."
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Lobbyists are “one of the most effective political weapons in the corporatocracy’s arsenal. These men and women make sure that politicians draft laws that support corporate needs, even then those laws countermand campaign promises and disregard pubic opinion.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Communications networks work in tandem with the lobbyists. Corporatocracy dominance of the mainstream media has grown steadily, paralleling the rise of Friedman capitalism. In 1983, fifty corporations controlled that vast majority of all news media in the United States. By 1992, that had been reduced to less than thirty. In 2004, only six huge corporations … owned most of the industry…In both their news reporting and their editorials, they promote “free trade” agreements, privatization, and the other polices that have led to the current crises."
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"Members of the corporatocracy are not part of a conspiracy, but they are characterized by an obsession with winning. They will invest vast amounts of money to get their way."
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"We often justify the unscrupulous actions of the modern robber barons because they contribute money to philanthropy and the arts."
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"... the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been severely criticized for investing its endowment in companies that are accused of contributing to poverty in the very Third World countries where that foundation’s stated goal is to relieve poverty.”
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"As a young founder and CEO, Gates had a reputation for brutally beating down competitors. He and Microsoft have been attacked in many countries for business practices that at best are morally questionable and at worst illegal."
Read more about the corporatocracy's takeover of urban public education:
According to Lareau, one characteristic of working class and poor parents which would make them easy targets for the school privatization movement is that this group does not have the same type of social competencies as middle class parents. Lareau describes how these different competencies affect the types of interactions which the parents have with their children’s schools, for instance, working class and poor parents:
are less likely to customize interactions to suit their preferences
accept actions of persons in authority, but at times covertly resist them
are sometimes not as aware of children’s school situation
may resist school rules as unreasonable
have trouble getting “the school” to respond to their needs
give a lesson in powerlessness and frustration in the face of an important institution
are generally unable to make the rules work in their favor when they confront the institution
Because middle class parents rear their children in a “concerted cultivation” model, succeeding generations are instilled with a sense of entitlement. Working class and poor parents rear their children according to a “natural growth” model, which perpetuates a sense of constraint in their succeeding generations.
Nearly completely absent in education reform discussions is how schools could be improved by building stronger ways to foster a greater sense of entitlement in working class and poor families, as well as to guide them in ways to effectively implement it. This would be especially challenging to do with those who have experienced living under a weak or non-existent democratic model, or who have limited English-speaking abilities, but it would not be impossible and this is what the venture philanthropists should be spending their money on. Increased civic engagement on the part of parents would certainly provoke a greater bureaucratic response on the part of their school districts. Parents who feel empowered and competent who are advocating for change can accomplish a lot. Remember the Chinese fishing proverb?
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
But because building a greater sense of mastery for parents has not been sufficiently nurtured, and has even been sabotaged and discouraged by school bureaucracies, a door has been opened wide for the outside privatization forces to insert themselves into those communities. This is evident in the expansion of “we want your child, but we don’t need your input" charter schools. And as this feature is getting more and more firmly rooted in the ground, any and all remaining levels for an opportunity for true community engagement is being entirely wiped out. With school boards being abolished, no elections will be held, and no meetings will be conducted to invite public input. School enrollment is depending more and more on how successfully schools can market themselves to working class and poor parents, with pretty imprinted pencils, glossy color brochures and glowing promises.
The popular explanation of how it this all going to sort itself out is that parents “will vote with their feet.” This method causes an awful lot of disruption, as unhappy parents who don't have a say in how things are run, yank their kids out mid-year and wander over to the next school. Most parents would be perfectly happy if their children could stay put, if their input was regularly solicited, if their comments actually listened too, and if they were made to feel that they were respected and that their views were considered to be valid. This doesn’t happen enough in today’s school bureaucracies, and it hasn't for years. But it is entirely excluded when there is a top-down regime operating from afar, such as is the case with Oakland’s largest charter school provider, Aspire Public Schools. The members of its board of directors hail from far reaching communities, big businesses, and venture capital organizations, and none of them have anything to do with the People of Oakland. A middle class community would never permit its public schools to be run this way.
So along these lines, there was an interesting segment on The World the other day (12/9/09). Anchor Marco Werman spoke with Christian Science Monitor correspondent Fred Weir in Moscow about the Russian culture of accountability. Weir has been living in Russia for 23 years. The story pertained to the Russia’s culture of corruption, indifference and fatalism in relation to the tragic nightclub fire:
I think it’s an age old problem, probably because people are disconnected, and always have been, from authority and the means of getting things done. You know it’s very common for people in Russian to say, “Well nothing depends on me.” I think that’s part of the story and the corruption comes also from just an unaccountable bureaucracy. They’re not elected, they’re not transparent, they’re not susceptible to public pressure and they tend to use their positions – and this is an age old thing in Russia again – to enrich themselves…
…Russia has never had a functioning democracy. It doesn’t have the civil society, the kinds of unity avenues by which people, say in the United States, do insert themselves in the process, again not perfect, but you have so many different ways if you are an individual in a Western country to express yourself, be heard, to at least take a shot rhetorically at an official who you feel has wronged you.
You have so many different ways [in the U.S.] that just don’t exist in Russia, and never did. And this, of course, leads to the sense of impunity on the part of bureaucrats and officials who just don’t feel any need to respond to public pressure.
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...[change] involves actually changing that bureaucracy, dragging them out into the open, making them publicly accountable, having elections that are truly competitive and which would allow opposition figures perhaps to come into power. You know, allowing people in their communities to show initiative runs the risk of them challenging authority, and this is where Russian reformers always tend to draw the line after they’ve made these wonderful speeches. They want the country to modernize, but they don’t want opposition to form. They don’t want real, independent initiatives to take place, and that’s the conundrum that we always see.
Urban areas don’t need more charter schools and more passivity; this is a wrong and dangerous direction to take. For our democracy to stay strong, we need to start building the capacity of people to become regularly and effectively engaged. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is alarmed at the loss of civics instruction in school over recent years. She said:
... public education is the only long-term solution to preserving an independent judiciary and, more importantly, to preserving a robust constitutional democracy,” she said. “The better educated our citizens are, the better equipped they will be to preserve the system of government we have. And we have to start with the education of our nation’s young people. Knowledge about our government is not handed down through the gene pool. Every generation has to learn it, and we have some work to do.
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One unintended effect of the No Child Left Behind Act, which is intended to help fund teaching of science and math to young people, is that it has effectively squeezed out civics education because there is no testing for that anymore and no funding for that,” she said. “And at least half of the states no longer make the teaching of civics and government a requirement for high school graduation. This leaves a huge gap, and we can’t forget that the primary purpose of public schools in America has always been to help produce citizens who have the knowledge and the skills and the values to sustain our republic as a nation, our democratic form of government.
Related concerns are also expressed by James Boyd White in Part one of his essay, “Law, economics, and torture”. White is a law professor, literary critic, scholar and philosopher who has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1983:
As the government withdraws from the regulation of the economy, as it has been doing for decades now, its place is taken by private individuals or private organizations which have immense power over the lives of all of us.
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The rhetoric supporting this movement speaks of government as the enemy, and the market as freedom for us all. But the power that is created by the disparity of wealth is real power and, unlike governmental power, it is not shaped or guided by law and democracy. Corporate owners and managers are not elected by the people, not subject to the constitution, not supposed – or even allowed – to be motivated by any ideal other than the acquisition of wealth and power, and usually not responsive to argument or complaint.
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The consumer dream of our culture teaches us that we have no responsibility, no capacity for action, no right to demand meaning in our work and lives, and no obligation for the welfare of others. It induces the sense of learned helplessness I referred to earlier—which is exactly the opposite of the kind of vigorous independence and competence upon which democracy depends.
And in discussing propaganda and advertising, White says
…one characteristic of both forms is that nothing is meant, everything is said for the moment, all on the assumption that the people who make up the audience have no memory and no capacity for critical thought. A world is created where thought is not possible. In neither domain—the consumer economy or the world of politics and government—are we defined as responsible participants in a world of shared life and action. Rather, we are manipulated objects of an empire.
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…the reason we do not rebel at the immense and unfair transfer of wealth, and all that is associated with it…is that in some sense we do not believe that we really have democracy at all any more, at least in the sense in which we once thought we did.
With restricted autonomy and “learned helplessness,” calling ourselves a democracy is a falsehood. To make our public schools better and to keep our democracy strong, this is the situation we need to begin to reverse, and quickly.
