Why Are Things As They Are?

“…That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness…”

Remember! Call For Proposals–Rouge Forum Conference August 2-5, 2010:
www.rougeforumconference.org/

March 4th Actions, Analysis and Video:

WashPost Lead on March 4th Actions: “The University of California at Santa Cruz, expecting disruptions, had advised employees and others not to come to campus Thursday. Dozens of students blocked roads, prohibiting drivers from entering the campus at its main and west entrances. There were also reports of students intimidating employees. At Berkeley, the Academic Senate urged protesters to “stay on your feet” and offered helpful hints for those who chose arrest. Organizers hoped to spur events in 30 other states.” www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/04/AR2010030401307.html?hpid=topnews#

California March 4th Actions and Beyond, A Critical Approach:www.richgibson.com/march4actions.html

San Diego M4 VIDEOS:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNxMyZ4ZV1g&feature=related

San Diego M4 Specific Media:
www.examiner.com/x-28151-Balboa-Park-Examiner~y2010m3d5-San-Diegans-voice-support-for-education-at-Balboa-Park-demonstration
www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/mar/05/countys-colleges-see-mass-protests/
www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2010-03-04/politics-city-county-government/1200-marchers-protest-against-budget-cuts-at-schwarzenegger%E2%80%99s-office
www.kpbs.org/news/2010/mar/04/day-action-education-unites-california/

Powerful Message From Europe: “All appeals to so called democratic institutions to save the public university will suffice for nothing. No condition of the past is worth romantically looking back to. The time has come not to save the university, but to decompose it, to dissolve
its institutional patterns, to destroy its ritualized reality, as well as the rest of this
society, and to build something new on the ruins.”
wirbelwind.noblogs.org/gallery/6019/spring.pdf

England Action vs Cuts: “ SUSSEX STUDENTS OCCUPY VICE CHANCELLOR’S OFFICE AGAINST CUTS Students have barricaded themselves inside the management offices at Sussex University. They are protesting against the Vice Chancellor’s plans to make 115 staff redundant. The job cuts would eradicate the environmental sciences degree programme, and significantly reduce the size of the English, history, and life science departments. The student advice service, the crèche, security services and catering staff also face savage cuts.The students’ action is part of a national day of action against education cuts”
conventionagainstfeesandcuts.wordpress.com/

Joburg, S. Africa, Students Fight Cops for Education: “South African police on Thursday used water cannons to disperse groups of protesting Johannesburg university students demanding the government provide free tertiary education for the poor.”  www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE6230F4.htm

Stan Weir on Class War Lessons, The Oakland General Strike and Implications for Today. flyingpicket.org/node/19

Against Ravitch: www.richgibson.com/againstravitch.html

On the Little Rouge School Front:

Obamagogue: “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th graders passed state math tests — 7 percent.  When a school board wasn’t able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff.  As my Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, says, our kids get only one chance at an education, and we need to get it right. ”
scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2010/03/turnarounds-obama-endorses-central-falls-decision.html

We await the profound self-critiques of those who helped lead others into putting the demagogue into office.

George Schmidt: Time to Inflate the Rat! “we should never forget that the slavish subservience of the current leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, which joined Arne Duncan in policies that are now metasticizing across the USA under “Race To The Top”, helped make the current national attack on the teachers and principals who serve the poor possible.” www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1223&section=Article

Ratt Winners and Losers–Who Can Make Sense of This Behind the Wall of Secrecy? “In the competition for $4 billion in Race to the Top grants, states have made their best pitches, a secret jury has debated and scored their applications…many of them are Southern, right-to-work states. New York is a surprise because many argue its student-teacher data law is weak, and its attempt to loosen restrictions on charters failed. Kentucky made the list, but has no charter law. Also, Colorado is the only Western state to make the cut.”
blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2010/03/xx_states_are_named_race_to_th.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CampaignK-12+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Politics+K-12%29

The History as A Weapon Resource Site: www.historyisaweapon.com/indextrue.html

Mark Bosquet on the University and Contingent Labor (5-6 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=8flaepmuvdw




Detroit and the Question of the Day: Community or Barbarism?

Detroit Activist Teacher Steve Conn is suing to prevent Bob Bobb, owned by the Broad Foundation,  from demolishing what is left of schooling in Detroit while Bobb picks up a nice raise, after gutting the DFT contract, $10,000 cut from every educator:

Bob Bobb, Detroit Schools Boss, Gets $81,000 Raise (From Broad)After Union Takes Massive Concessions:
www.detnews.com/article/20100303/SCHOOLS/3030350/1022/Detroit-Schools–Bobb-gets-$81K-raise

Skillman et al to Replace All Detroit Schools with..Whatever: “”Making the old ones better doesn’t work,” Ross said. “They need to be closed and new schools created by people with track records.”Otis Mathis, president of the DPS board, said he had not heard about the plan until contacted by the Free Press late Friday, but said he was not surprised. The attention to DPS’s woes has drawn plenty of plans and ideas. But as in too many of those plans, the DPS board once again had been left out of those discussions, he said.”
www.freep.com/article/20100306/NEWS01/3060358/1318/A-plan-Detroit-schools

Art? Schmart! Detroit and Suburban Schools Finish it Off: Only 40 percent, or 69, of the 172 DPS schools have an art teacher, down from 80 percent 10 years ago. And just 30 percent of Detroit schools — the engines that powered Motown — offer music instruction…suburban schools may not be far behind. In October, all public schools suffered a $165 per pupil cut in state aid — some suburbs lost even more..”The pressure to improve math and reading scores is so great that the fear response has been to get rid of everything else,”..For DPS’ Pruitt, the worst part of his job is dealing with all the violins, trumpets and drums now gathering dust at schools without music programs.”I’ll have the instruments lined up in the hall waiting for the truck, and kids walk by with wide eyes,” Pruitt said.”At first they think I’m their new band director. And I have to tell them, ‘No. I’m here to take your instruments away.’ ”
www.detnews.com/article/20100222/SCHOOLS/2220332/Arts-lose-out-in-Metro-school-cuts#ixzz0gFaRK24t

More Detroit Administrators Caught With Hands in the Till While Bus Service Privatized:www.freep.com/article/20100223/NEWS01/100223057/1320/2-school-officials-suspended-for-alleged-theft
www.freep.com/article/20100223/NEWS01/100223024/1322/DPS-to-privatize-bus-services
Detroit Public Schools Board Prez Can’t Read or Write: His email, “If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.”  www.detnews.com/article/20100304/OPINION03/3040437/1409/Does-DPS-leader-s-writing-send-wrong-message?#ixzz0hFnsExh6

Detroit Sells 11 schools for $4 Million!
www.freep.com/article/20100303/NEWS01/3030315/1003/Detroit-Public-Schools-gets-4-million-for-11-properties?GID=6+GzN4vn2qFroDIjcrAhkCa5W3OB0QaY4yEeazDK5NA%3D

NYTimes Mag on Building a Better Teacher (long):
www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=2&emc=eta

On the Perpetual Wars and Booming Inequality Front: March 20=7 Years Since Iraq

McChrystal to Troops, “Sorry ‘bout that.” “ McChrystal’s decision to maintain the outpost at Barg-e Matal prompted the top American commanders in eastern Afghanistan to delay plans to close a second remote U.S. outpost, Combat Outpost Keating, where insurgents killed eight U.S. troops in an assault Oct. 3, a McClatchy investigation has found. Keeping Barg-e-Matal open also deprived a third isolated base of the officer who would have been its acting commander and left its command to lower-ranking officers whose “ineffective actions” led “directly” to the deaths of five American and eight Afghan soldiers in an ambush Sept. 8, according to a high-level military investigation. www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/02/20/86824/probes-overlook-top-us-generals.html

McChrystal to His Puppet Karzai: Tell the Folks, “Sorry ‘bout That.”
“Sunday’s airstrike was the second in a week to kill Afghan civilians. A week earlier, U.S. Marines killed 12 Afghans during the ongoing offensive in the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in southern Afghanistan.Sunday’s strike hit a three-vehicle convoy of civilians in a remote part of the country. There were conflicting estimates of the death toll. The Afghan Council of Ministers said that 27 civilians — including four women and a child — had been killed, while the local police chief said 21 had died. Two others were missing, he said.” The attack came a day after Karzai used a speech before the Afghan parliament to prod McChrystal and NATO to step up their efforts to reduce civilian deaths.”
www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/02/22/87352/us-concedes-air-strike-killed.html

NY Times Oped–Exterminate the Brutes–Get Those Bombs Flying! Author Obscure:
“So in a modern refashioning of the obvious — that war is harmful to civilian populations — the United States military has begun basing doctrine on the premise that dead civilians are harmful to the conduct of war. The trouble is, no past war has ever supplied compelling proof of that claim.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/opinion/18dadkhah.html

The Core Issue of Our Time is the Real Promise of Perpetual War and Booming Inequality Met by the Potential of Mass Class Conscious Resistance Front:

Personal Bankruptcies Rise Again: “Personal bankruptcy filings were back on the upswing in February after dipping the prior month. There were 111,693 consumer bankruptcy filings last month, up 9% from January, the American Bankruptcy Institute said Tuesday based on data from the National Bankruptcy Research Center. The increase comes after filings fell 10% in January. The report offered little indication that the flood of consumer bankruptcies is easing. The number of filings was 14% above year-ago levels. Compared to the same period two years ago – when the unemployment rate was just 4.8% — filings were up 47%.”
blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/03/02/personal-bankruptcies-resume-upward-trend/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Feconomics%2Ffeed+%28WSJ.com%3A+Real+Time+Economics+Blog%29

Brother Can You Spare A Job?

Review of Stiglitz, the Keynesian, Freefall: “Stiglitz argues that “the failures in our financial system are emblematic of broader failures in our economic system, and the failures of our economic system reflect deeper problems in our society” — including growing inequities of wealth, a lack of accountability on the part of business and political leaders, and an emphasis on short-term gains as opposed to long-term benefits.” “we will emerge from the crisis with a much larger legacy of debt, with a financial system that is less competitive, less efficient and more vulnerable to another crisis.”
www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/books/19book.html

The New Yorker on Stiglitz: “In Stiglitz’s anguished, withering assessment, the bailouts approved by the Bush and Obama Administrations amount to a colossal transfer of public wealth into private hands, a transfer he compares to Russia’s giveaways to the oligarchs. As steep as the monetary costs have been, the political costs may be greater still: in attempting to restore confidence to financial markets, Washington gambled away the people’s confidence in government.” www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/brieflynoted/2010/03/08/100308crbn_brieflynoted1#ixzz0hNccplf8

Classic of the Week : The New Poverty by John Berger (b.1926): The poeverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied, but written off as trash. The 20th century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.

Almost Song of the Week: Everything is Ok, For Sure!

Thanks to Bill T, Lloyd, Perry, Ofira, Mr J and Mr Z, Wayne, Katy, Greg, Faith, Nancy P, Adam and Gina, Wayne S, Bob,  Sharon A and Sherry, Dede, Pete, Steve, Dana, Kelly, Bart, Donna, Evan and Ethel, Amber, George L, Ricky, Dennis B, Marisol, Crystal, Isabel, Dannym Sharon A, Sherry W, Marc and Bonnie, Bill, and Gene.

Good luck to us, every one.

r