Fact-esque

The Culture of the Rich

So our democracy is finally dead after 235 yrs, replaced by the corporatist plutocracy the rich have always wanted. Our old level-seeking, middle-class-directed economy is no more, replaced by a plutonomy aimed at filling the needs of the rich and ignoring everyone else. Is that as far as it goes? Unfortunately, no.

Unsatisfied with simple control of all the money generated by the society on which it feeds, the plutocracy has been using a sizable chunk of its wealth to pay for propaganda to help "reorganize" the role and goals of the whole culture. Since this is the culture in which we will be living for the foreseeable future, it probably behooves us to start learning and internalizing its rules.

Wishful Thinking on Our Labor Climate: Tulane v. US Auto Rebound

OK, so when teh shite hit teh fan (supposedly) and the auto companies were facing bankruptcy (supposedly) and the Obama Admin was putting a lot of pressure on the UAW to cut management some slack in order to save their members' jobs (supposedly), fear ran like a little rodent through the union and once again Labor sacrificed so executives could keep their McMansions and their Beamers.

OK, so now that the auto market is strengthening (supposedly) and profits are up again (quite definitely), the unions want management to remember the last their of umpteen sacrifices and give back some of the give-backs the car companies extorted under the guise of "financial difficulties" they had largely brought on themselves, assuming of course that such difficulties actually existed which isn't at all clear when you look at the offshore books.

Obama's Education Plan: Good-Bye to NCLB But Hello to What, Exactly?

At Open Salon, old new lefty, an ex-teacher, thinks Obama's education plan (TBA tomorrow) presages Obama finally finding his feet as a progressive.

I know that many...have given up hope on President Obama. Yes, we are all disappointed in the flaming disaster that the health care bill has been. However, it now looks like Obama has made a significant midcourse correction and actually started looking presidential for a change.

One of the factors in this turnaround is that a man becomes very concentrated when he knows that he is going to be hanged. Samuel Johnson said this in the 1700s, and Obama took it to heart while he looked at his poll numbers and odds for Democratic losses in Congress this November.

An example of this was today's announcement from the White House on educational reform. In technical language it states that from now the orientation of school districts will be to prepare students for colleges and jobs, rather than meeting particular grade level proficiencies. In English, this means that as far as the Democrats are concerned, No Child Left Behind is now dead meat. And good riddance, I say!

As regular readers will know all too well, I take second place to no one when it comes to abhorrence of NCLB. I was one of its earliest, most strenuous and persistent critics, and the destruction I predicted it would do, it has done. But o.n.l. seems to be satisfied that Obama is killing off NCLB and pointing to a new goal.

Privatized Student Loan Programs Threatened; Bidding Begins

Bush privatized govt's student loan programs, creating a new industry that squeezed $$$billions$$$ out of families and prospective students who were in the programs to begin with because they couldn't afford to borrow money the standard way at the standard rates. IOW, another banking ripoff. Obama has threatened to close the govt's privatization program, calling it "wasteful", as indeed it is. The response was predictable: industry lobbyists are gearing up to buy themselves some pols.

Bush III: Obama's Personal Anti-Abortion Advocate & God-Friendly Scientist

I hate to say the same things over and over again but I often don't have much choice: Obama isn't all that different from Bush and it isn't just civil rights or his obeisance to Wall Street. Sarah Posner writes in The Nation that he has just appointed Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG), to lead the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kelley isn't exactly a wingnut but she is anti-abortion in a job that requires her to be objective at the very least. (Via T2A)

The College Loan Mess 2: The Banks Fight Back

Once again a mild attempt by Obama to short-cut greed, apply sanity, and save a lot of wasted taxpayer bucks is under the corporate gun. We noted a few days ago that the president wanted to "cut out the middleman" and have the govt save $$millions$$ by administering college loans through the DOEd for cost rather than through private lenders at cost + a nice, fat profit. TPM is reporting today that Citigroup is gearing up to fight the president's plan. Why? I'll give yah 3 guesses but you'll only need one.

If Citigroup -- recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds and constant visits with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and longtime employer of former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin -- is supposed to be the government's friend, it's quite the underminer. Today the bank emailed borrowers who took out student loans with Citigroup encouraging them to write to Congress opposing the administration's student loan proposal.

Obama has been talking about overhauling student loans since at least 2007, echoing GAO estimates that banks had been taking in $15 million a day peddling and securitizing private student loans without taking on any risk, since student loans are guaranteed by the government and cannot even be discharged in a bankruptcy. The "most controversial" aspect of his proposed legislation, according to the New York Times, would cut out the proverbial middleman so all students could borrow directly from the government. Any "controversy," of course, is likely to be fomented by the banks that make money off the arrangement....

Like for instance, oh, I don't know, Citibank?

Remains of the Loan Sharks: College Aid in the Post-Bush Era

We've been following this story in fits and starts since 2004 and I hate to say it but everything we predicted seems to have come true. Money is tighter, tuitions are higher, the shoe-string govt loan programs have been tailored to favor expensive private lenders, and the whole system now reeks of exclusion.

The Bush Library: Control of History to Save a Sorry Image

George W Bush, as I have argued many times, has been a spectacularly successful president - if your definition of "successful" includes turning the govt into a sort of combination National Chamber of Commerce and corporate wish-list enforcer. He has virtually gotten everything he's asked for, usually on his own terms. He had a rubber-stamp Republican Congress for 6 of his 8 years and even when the Democrats won it back in '06 largely due to the way his ultraconservative, pro-corporate policies devastated the country, they continued to give him pretty much everything he wanted, including FISA, telecom immunity, more troops in Iraq (anybody remember "the surge"?) and worker- and environment-unfriendly trade deals.

But once he's gone, history is not going to look kindly on him. He hasn't left yet and already they aren't. The reasons are simple: his success has been a disaster for the nation in every important area one can think of. Surprisingly, that's not how he sees it. For example, he's currently running around insisting that the odious, destructive NCLB has been a major success and even had the gall to warn Obama not to mess with it.

Bush argued that No Child Left Behind has "forever changed America's school systems" for the better, forcing accountability on failing public schools and leading to measurable improvements among poor and minority students. [There's no evidence whatever it has done any such thing, but since when would a lack of proof stop Bush?]

"I firmly believe that, thanks to this law, students are learning, an achievement gap is closing," Bush told the audience at General Philip Kearny School.

He also suggested that Obama, who has vowed to overhaul the program, should tread carefully before following through on promises of reform. "There is a growing consensus across the country that now is not the time to water down standards or to roll back accountability," Bush said.

No, there isn't. There's a growing consensus that NCLB has been an utter failure and needs to be re-vamped. Personally, I think it's so bad there's no saving it. We ought to throw it out and start over.

No Child Left Behind Mark II

BushCo's education policy was all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by pretending to care about closing the achievement gap.  To doubt their motives was to believe the bigotry of low expectations.  Now it looks like Obama's education policy will be all about busting the teachers unions and hiding it by claiming that what they really want to do is to end poverty.  From Truthout: (via Avedon)

  Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are deunionized). Thus, in Duncan's attempts to close and transform low-performing schools, he not only reinvents them as entrepreneurial schools, but, in many cases, frees "them from union contracts and some state regulations."[9] Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions. What became clear is that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at stake in this vision is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace.

Something to watch.

Obama's Sec Ed: Not a Teacher

At Open Salon teacher/blogger Graeme Gilmann thinks Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as SecEd might not have been the best possible choice.

Duncan has some educational background but has not ever actually been a teacher. In 1992 Ducan became the head of a program called the Ariel Education Initiative which was started to enhance educational opportunities for children on Chicago's South Side. In 1998 he joined the Chicago Public Schools and later becameDeputy Chief of Staff for former Schools CEO Paul Vallas in 1999. In 2001, he was appointed by mayor Richard Daley to serve as CEO for Chicago public schools.

As a teacher, I am slightly uneasy with Obama's choice. One of the errors of the Bush Administration (among others) in directing policy for public education in recent history has been to treat students like numbers, foisting a plethora of standardized testing measures on students without proper support, financing, or meaningful connection to the real world. The present administration has been especially stubborn in upholding policies like NCLB (No Child Left Behind) with little or no regard for teacher perspective. (With very few exceptions, the teachers I have talked to hate NCLB, or at very least feel it is a well-intentioned measure that lacks the financial support and infrastructure to make it feasible). Attempts to modify or replace policies like NCLB have often been cast as desperate attempts by trenchant dissenters, teachers who lazily want to use their tenure to shield themselves from any unpleasant changes in the status quo that would threaten their practices or jobs. While such teachers undoubtedly exist, I believe that the majority of teachers are passionate, empathetic people who truly care about doing whatever is best for our students.

Personally, I'm not real concerned that Obama's going to stick with NCLB or demand Bushian/conservative rigid standardized testing, though I could be wrong. But even though I disagree with Gilmann's reasons, I have to say I agree with his concerns. Yes, a SecEd should be a proven administrator (especially with the mess Spellings et al left behind) but s/he should also be somebody with teaching experience.