photo mrmanc

They fail to realize that we are already muddling through the muck. Furthermore, the election offers little chance of addressing our malaise, as issues of economy, foreign policy and national security are largely insulated from public purview.  One can make a reasonable argument for voting Obama in swing states as a strategic defense move, though that is it. Otherwise, it seems that the self-professed liberal should be busying himself with social movement activism. The manifold nature of injustice in this country leaves little time for the well-intentioned to descend into the pathetic stupor of electoral obsession. From student debt relief to stopping the private prison racket to defending public schools and libraries from the ravages of austerity, we need our collective intellect and imagination focused on public betterment.

However, a large segment of liberals are not genuinely motivated by concerns of social justice. For them, politics is bourgeois social activity. They vote for Democrats as a demonstration of how cultured and swank they are. Some even use politics as a means of assuaging the guilt they feel about their position of relative privilege. This tendency descends, in large part, from Thomas Jefferson: the original American liberal. The slave-owner who decried the evils of that institution. The “small-government” advocate who helped greatly expand the size and scope of the federal government. The champion of individual rights, except for the “noble savages” in our midst. Jefferson was a walking contradiction, and so too are his ideological descendants, whom I term the “Bad Faith Liberals.”

They appear to be that which they are not: a living contrivance. On the topic of “bad faith,” Sartre alluded to the deception of the waiter at a Parisian cafe, trying too hard to play his role, herky-jerky in motion: visibly outside of his skin. He is inauthentic, but realizes this to some degree. His free will is compromised by circumstance. Perhaps the waiter fears for the security of his job if he behaves differently. The liberal, likewise, fears the consequences of making far-reaching criticisms. He knows it will jeopardize his relative comfort in the world. He fears it will alienate him from friends and family, who collectively choose to not think critically about politics. His career might suffer as well as his social status, as ours is a superficial culture where nonconformity renders one “crazy.”

This thinking represents the psychological underpinnings of authoritarianism. And have no illusions about it: this is an authoritarian country by any reasonable measure. Having the world’s highest incarceration rate is enough evidence. Further confirmation is the fact that a sizeable portion of the population believes that the rich have intrinsic qualities, and merit their wealth regardless of how it was attained. Liberals, too, believe it cliché, even trite, to suggest that social democracy might have some intellectual value. To speak of a common good renders one old-fashioned and “narrow minded.” Ours is a society that worships the rich and powerful, even to the point of providing excuse for their voracity.

This is important because politics is a reflection of society (the two do not exist in a vacuum). Our culture is obsessed with individual: from sports phenoms to movie and music stars to political figures. As such, the national conversation is generally about personalities and petty dramas rather than ideals. Meanwhile, much of what does pass for meaningful discourse amongst liberals serves merely to provide a veneer for the inherent contradiction of their existence.

The bad-faith liberal pretends to be a humanitarian, whilst actually an enabler of the American military machinery that has devastating consequences for civilian populations in affected regions. He poses as anti-racist, despite allowing for a national security policy that explicitly targets Muslim and Arab populations for special surveillance and judicial treatment. He has also permitted the proliferation of private prison gulags that prey on minority and poor populations so as to maintain a positive balance sheet. These represent just a smattering of the issues not discussed at any of the debates. Even the foreign policy debate is pure platitude, no substance. These are the realities the Blind Faith Liberals disregard, because it is easier to live a contradiction than to demonstrate the agency to address systemic injustices.

One can argue that it is unfair to pin these crimes on liberals, as they are not the primary promulgators. However, they have the capacity to do something, and have instead continued on with their merry lives. Many bourgeois liberals have yet to be significantly impacted by the economic and social decline of the country. Working-class and poor populations, largely minorities, have obviously been the most profoundly inured by the neo-liberal authoritarianism that now predominates. The bad-faith liberal has only caught a whiff thus far. Perhaps they feel the stress of a workplace that has been stripped of job security, reasonable vacation time and health care provisions. They might be joining the growing numbers of people suffering from depression and other psychological disorders associated with stress and feelings of inadequacy. Maybe their adult-age children are having problems finding jobs and making student debt payments. Nonetheless, the Bad Faith Liberal remains committed to the existent political superstructure, and his contradictory role within it.

In so doing, he undercuts his own freedom, by limiting his role to cheerleading for one side of the boxing match. The two permitted parties define themselves in opposition to one another, and this delineation ultimately encompasses the culture of the country writ large. Americans often judge one another in reference to a liberal-conservative dichotomy. The red state vs. blue state rhetoric is ubiquitous. Liberals decry gun-toting, god-fearing southerners, and conservatives complain of a threat from amorphous “outsiders.” The two sides invariably play the role assigned, out of fear of freedom. And it is ultimately this fear that unites them, together in the muck.

They keep each other down through this culture of oppositionalism. The fear breeds resentment and guilt, which leads the American to hate himself and thus his compatriot. It is this process that informs the lack of a robust social safety network in this country, as failure is almost invariably blamed solely on the individual. This further leads to a juvenile tendency to disparage and demean others for trivial and superficial reasons. The net result is the destruction of confidence and dignity, rendering the American unlikely to stand up for himself against the rapacious and regressive forces of organized money.

Indeed, the Bad Faith Liberal stands up to no one. He merely externalizes his lack of confidence through the politics of oppositionalism. He believes that the country would be better off without the angry, resentful, small-town conservative. He sees not that he shares those first two traits. If the two would overcome these drains on the soul, and speak civilly to one another, we could recommence the task of nation building in the United States. We might even regain the passion necessary to function as a democratic polity.

This requires realizing our free will. We are not cogs in a machine. We are not restrained to playing a tightly-defined role in some convoluted national narrative. We needn’t choose team red or team blue. We have the ability, like all humans, to be dynamic and thoughtful individuals. And if we demonstrate that dynamism in a collective effort aimed at addressing the ever-expanding authoritarianism in our midst, we will arise from the muck one day.

From my perspective as a native of Chicago, alum of its public school system, and activist of various sorts, little could be more gripping than this current Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike. Normally, the intriguing tales of social movement action occur in foreign countries, involving actors that are not so personally connected to me. This one, however, hits home quite literally, as my mother is a retired Chicago Public School (CPS) teacher: one who worked for 35 years in an underserved elementary school on the city’s South Shore. There was nothing particularly flashy about her tenure nor was there meant to be. It was honorable public service: the humble work of someone who sought to do her share without taking special credit in the way Teach for Ameri-scabs seem to demand recognition for helping those “poor little minority kids.” And behind the fight over a just contract and due compensation for Mayor Rahmbo’s longer school day lies the central theme of this story: one of the last principled unions in this country is taking a stand against the ongoing effort to turn the nation’s schools into a veritable strip mall of charter schools.

The charter movement is reflective of broader trend of transforming our urban centers into playgrounds for young (mostly white) professionals seeking to pass their post-collegiate years caught up in a trendy nexus of cafes and brew pubs, with a smattering of yoga studios interspersed. The schools are largely an afterthought, as said yuppies likely intend to retreat to suburbia before having any kids: that or they will use private schools or hope their kid tests into a selective enrollment program of choice. As such, they are not overly concerned with the quality of the local public schools, which are primarily used by poor black and immigrant populations. This disconnect between various members of the population and the needs of public infrastructure represents a breakdown in community. Charter advocates have preyed on this breakdown to move in with an eye on the prize of billions of tax dollars waiting to be extracted, with enough to go around to all parties involved: for-profit charter companies, textbook publishers, test-makers, real estate interests, construction companies, and so forth.

The Emanuel administration has plans for a long-term shuttering of 80-120 public schools, with the bulk of those students ostensibly transferring over to a sloppy array of charter schools. I take some editorial liberty by inserting the word sloppy, simply because I now live in New Orleans, the charter dream city. It was here that state officials used the cover of Hurricane Katrina to Shock Doctrine the local system, chartering all but a few schools while the city lay in ruin. The resulting arrangement is a confusing collection of independent and network charters, wherein some schools fall under the state’s purview (or lack thereof) and others are governed by the city, while still others are part of the misnamed “Recovery School District.”

Behind this project was the same cast of charter advocates at work in Chicago: the Gates Foundation, the aforementioned Teach for America, a hodgepodge of Astroturf groups like “Stand for Children” and “All Children Matter,” and the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And, I repeat, the power grab was done while the vast majority of the union staff was evacuated due to the devastation wrought by one of the worst natural disasters in this country’s history. In other words, we are up against utter scumbags in this fight. Vile, despicable scum!

On that note, let’s get back to Rahm Emanuel. Hate him all you want, I know I do, but he is actually quite a gift for the left. He is such a raving asshole that even the corporate press is showing tepid signs of support for the CTU in the current impasse. And in this era of corporate hegemony, that is quite remarkable. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune led with this analysis:

“The measure of who won and lost in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s showdown with the Chicago Teachers Union won’t be clear until the details of the new contract emerge, but last week’s strike took some of the luster off the mayor’s self-portrait as an innovative leader brimming with new ways to solve the city’s most vexing challenges.

The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack.”

For good measure, the paper “balanced” the coverage with some of their typical yellow journalism: running a piece titled “CPS parents rally against strike,” which includes a video of some 8-10 people standing around barking inanely at a downtown intersection. This is quite insulting to those of us who have organized rallies with hundreds of people, and not one corporate press “reporter.”

The Sun-Times also struck a supportive tone, as columnist Mark Brown said: “If the point of going on strike is to get a better deal than you would have received without it, then the Chicago Teachers Union is already a pretty clear winner this week in its confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his school board.”

The potential agreement, which delegates will commence considering today, includes several significant concessions on the part of the city. These include a 16% pay increase over the next four years, allowing laid-off teachers the chance to be considered for new vacancies, and barring the school district from using budget shortfalls as pretext to cancel scheduled teacher raises (as the mayor threatened to do this time). What’s more, the district scaled back the level at which teacher evaluation would hinge on test scores from 50% to the state-mandated minimum of 25%. Under the plan, the union would make concessions on health care, by converting to a so-called wellness plan, wherein workers with pre-existing health issues pay higher premiums. Furthermore, laid-off teachers would be provided only six months compensation, rather than the current twelve. What’s more, the union would not be granted further grounds for taking strike action, which is now limited solely to issues of pay.

Wait, wait, wait. Did I just say that teachers are only allowed to strike over compensation!? For those who appreciate not having had to work at the age of 10, or who like their weekends and holidays, and the protections afforded by workplace safety regulations, it should seem pretty egregious that the union is currently limited to striking over pay. But this is the case, thanks to a state law enacted by the Democratic state assembly and signed by the Democratic governor last year. The same players also passed a law requiring a seemingly impossible 75% approval vote in order for the union to strike. Jonah Edelman, who heads the aforementioned pro-charter group Stand for Children, boasted at the time that the CTU would never achieve that threshold. He was shown up in June, when the union mustered an incredible 90% vote in support of the action (despite non-voters getting counted as “no’s.”)

In sum, Illinois Democrats have been minutely less offensive than Wisconsin Republicans in their attacks on organized labor. Rather than trampling collective bargaining rights altogether, they force teachers into the role of the avaricious union thugs, replete with their “Cadillac health care plans” (now on the chopping block), whining about pay in these tight economic times. Meanwhile, pro-charter activists, aided along by members of the press, widely spread the fallacy that Chicago teachers were making an average of $74,000 a year. In reality, that figure is $56,720. For new faculty or lower demand teachers (sadly, foreign language instructors . . ) the figure is significantly lower. This is roughly equivalent to the median household income throughout the country, in a city whose cost of living is 5.1% greater than the national average.

Imaging aside, the authoritarian strike law has also allowed for the mayor to set a trap, wherein he can now claim that teachers are continuing their strike illegally, since pay issues have been resolved in principle. In fact, Emanuel brashly sought an injunction Monday, though a judge refused to act prior to Wednesday, stating that the issue could become moot if the strike is resolved by then. Nonetheless, the union’s maneuverability is immensely compromised from here on, as the law simply does not allow for them to address the gamut of issues needing attention.

Prime among them, what CTU president Karen Lewis calls the “elephant in the room,” is the potential closure of 80-120 schools to make room for a New Orleans-style mass “charterization.” Authorities in Chicago probably won’t be afforded the cover of a natural disaster to implement a fire sale on that level, though  Rahm does have the benefit of that incessant crisis, otherwise known as the American economy. With both parties firmly set on austerity as a “solution,” with its emphasis on union busting, privatization, and scaling back city services, the CTU is probably in for a long-term fight.

It is certainly encouraging that they stood firm, unlike practically every other union in this country. However, until we have a viable third (and fourth- and fifth – ) party capable of capturing appreciable levels of power, union militancy will be sorely limited by the oppressive laws of the two parties of the 1%. Furthermore, it will be difficult to maintain the support of the public, with a popular press that is the mockery of the Western World. While the proliferation of “alternative press” online does help, too much of those options remain loyal to the Democratic Party establishment, and are simply not having the valuable conversations we need about how to move on from the Rahm’s and Obama’s of the world. I couldn’t be more with the teachers than I stand today, but I hope they realize that there remains a long, hard road ahead.

Last Friday’s Batman rampage has provoked the same inane chatter that typically follows one of these. The president claims to be shocked, though he can’t possibly be as aghast as his subjects are about the burgeoning drone program. Meanwhile, we see the same vacuous moral posturing from “left” and “right.”. Liberals prattle on about loose gun laws and violence in movies, whilst conservatives speak about the loss of religious values and the decline of the family. Very few people are willing to point to a general societal malaise, even after 20 or so of these outbursts since Columbine. This is because the prevailing personality on these shores is ego-driven to the core: so caught up in personal pursuits as to be unaware of the distress in their midst. The first tragedy, then, is the violent act, and the second is the unresponsiveness of society. Both of these are rooted in a hyperactive ego, aggravated by the forces of alienation, de-socialization and the heightened automation of American existence.

James Holmes (Photo: Donkey Hotey / Flickr)

While many trumpet the primacy of the American individual, life is actually quite contrived here. Choice has been whittled down to a handful of corporate options, no matter what product or service you desire. And the choice of personalities is even starker. The younger generations are forced to select between a few brutal archetypes: jocks and nerds for boys, princesses and tomboys for girls. We can forgive the immature mind for such a narrow range. However, we cannot forgive the parents who fail to imbue a greater depth of perception in their children.

Naturally, no one wants to be the fuddy duddy. Thus, Americans spend their teens and 20’s fixated on being “cool”: an obsession partially promulgated and easily manipulated by corporate interests. That was always the essence of MTV: marketing a monolithic image of what it means to be accepted in this country. It is the most vulgar form of conformity masquerading as individuality. The free spirit of the American youth is just as much a sham as the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union: pure propaganda.

We are no more individualistic than our counterparts throughout the West. Not to worry: we have them beat on a whole host of other measures, such as waist-lines, decibel level of speech, and insincerity of expression. All of these traits stem from the predominance of ego, right down to the bulging bellies. The American desires his dominance over a domain. Hence his particular vulnerability at the hands of the swindling mortgage brokers of Wall Street, who preyed on the retrograde commodity fetish of the suburban abode. The fatalistic ego, driven by the “will to power,” as Nietzche sees it, describes the contemporary United States. Its citizens see personal success and wealth as the prime attributes, and have generally retained naïve faith in the economic system to reward the most virtuous.

The disease of Western egoism is far more widespread than these shores, to be sure, but this is the epicenter. It is here where social frustration occasionally boils over in an otherwise properly functioning person, compelling him to go and spray a few hundred rounds of ammo at an unsuspecting audience. He sees a culture ravished by expressions of ego, wherein boisterousness is encouraged above all. James Holmes and VT killer Seung-Hui Cho were both described as introverted to the extreme. They each felt excluded on account of their personalities. This culture makes life difficult on introverts, as well as those that are simply more measured in approach: men are supposed to be loud, cocky and inane. They are meant to engage in fiery, yet baseless, chatter, yelling over one another in uncivilized fashion. The soundtrack of America is the noise of bad conversation: the subjects speak louder and louder until the tortured introvert provides the crescendo.

In a rather imprudent attempt at provocation by lefty commentator Alexander Cockburn on the Counterpunch site last week, he declares the Occupy movement dead, and then proceeds into full-fledged hissy-fit, saying of the movement: “There were . . . features that I think quite a large number of people found annoying: the cult of the internet, the tweeting and so forth, and I definitely didn’t like the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory.”

Medic at the Philadelphia National Occupy Gathering (Photo: Mark Haller, Occupy Erie / Flickr, used with permission)

I have personally always enjoyed his prose, owing largely to his willingness to criticize conventional wisdom on the left end of the spectrum. His vilification of the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Eric Alterman have been simply priceless. Even when he adopts an opinion I find reprehensible, as with his denials of anthropomorphic climate change, he raises sound points that merit attention. I understand the impetus to criticize: he is right to say “new movements always need a measure of cynicism dumped on them.” However, that is not what he is doing here. He is merely bitching. As with his now-weekly dung cart of (mostly) Americanisms that he and other Counterpunchers resent ever entering the English lexicon, he comes off as pompous and out of touch. In so doing, he has accentuated a noteworthy generational fissure at the core of this movement.

Those who characterize Occupy as narrowly concerned with inequality and malfeasance on Wall Street have it wrong. Rhetoric about the evil crooks amongst the 1% is simply convenient fodder for the chattering masses. Even Cockburn admits to the success of the 99% slogan. However, by admonishing the movement for not being ready with emergency mass actions in response to the latest financial scandal in the U.K., he demonstrates a misunderstanding of what the movement is. This is not a thriving bureaucracy waiting to pounce the minute scandal breaks with a new round of encampments, marches, and battle with the police. The movement is definitively organic. It is a raw expression of the frustration of a precarious generation. As such, it continues the European movements of the last ten years against tuition hikes, worsening employment conditions for young workers, and horrendous job prospects for the recently graduated. While I lived in France, students took to the streets in opposition to then-president Chriac’s new employment contract for under-25’s, but broadly spoke of La précarité as cause to organize.

This is about a social and economic system that seems to have been fatalistically designed to not provide for anyone much younger than the baby boomer. It is as if the West promised it would never repeat the insanity of the mid-20^th century, only to blunder its way into an increasingly bleak outlook for the mid-21^st century. Francis Fukuyama captured l’espirit  du temps with the declaration of the “End of History.” After thousands of years of human civilization, his generation had found the right way to organize the world. This logic is rooted in the smug determinism of the enlightenment together with the naïve belief in the perpetually progressive nature of the human condition. I see no difference between Fukuyama’s pseudo-scholarship and a cranky old lefty plodding into an Occupy GA only to deride the lack of “a plan,” before retreating to the writer’s den, anxiously awaiting the opportune moment to declare the whole thing dead.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has wasted no time this legislative session in pushing wide-reaching education reforms designed to expand the charter school footprint, while opening the door to vouchers and tying teacher tenure to student test results. In the early hours of the morning on March 23rd, after a marathon session, the Louisiana State House passed two bills that form the core of a wide-reaching education reform agenda designed to expand the charter school footprint, while opening the door to vouchers and tying teacher tenure to student test results. Governor Bobby Jindal wasted no time in pushing these reforms through in the first weeks of the legislative session, and the urgency with which he has advanced this agenda has infuriated teachers and left even some charter-school advocates alarmed. “The governor’s expression of urgency for these bills is specious at best. [They] did not have to be passed under cover of darkness,” says Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT) president Steve Monaghan. Even Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who has been an avid charter school advocate, criticized the Governor’s haste: “I am by no means naïve, and know full well the Administration’s political advantage of pushing legislation through with as little debate as possible.”  With these bills, Louisiana is set to join Florida, Ohio and Minnesota amongst the states that have enacted the most far-reaching of these school reforms. This marks the latest wave in a concerted nation-wide effort by right-wing advocacy organizations and their corporate supporters to ravage the public sector.

The last tidal wave of reform occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when authorities circumvented the process of debate by deliberating while large swaths of the population were still displaced. The changes enacted during that “Emergency Session” of the state legislature allowed for the vast majority of New Orleans’ public schools to be brought under the state-administered Recovery School District (RSD), which, in turn, facilitated the process of turning over management to private charters. In the meantime, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) was effectively eviscerated, as the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) fired the entirety of its teaching staff after losing control of the bulk of its schools.  Over the next few years, New Orleans became the nation’s first majority charter city: a bona fide model for school “reformers” keen on extending the “school choice” doctrine to the rest of the country.

The current legislative initiative will effectively spread the New Orleans model to the rest of the state, while loosening administrative checks on charter governance and opening up a new arena of unaccountable education providers via the voucher program. This is part of a nation-wide process of special interests and right wing zealots promulgating legislation designed to attack one of the few remaining public pillars of this society. Their goal now is turning Louisiana into its pet project. Far from becoming a model for thoughtful school reform, the state is set to become an example of the havoc wreaked when elite interests are allowed to run rampant over the democratic process.

In attempting to identify the instigators of this agenda, the story begins and ends with the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conduit between corporate boardrooms and elected officials willing to enact their agenda of austerity and privatization. The non-profit evades lobby disclosure requirements by presenting itself as an advocate of rather innocuous ends: “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty,” according to their website. In reality, their initiatives stick to a neo-liberal orthodoxy reminiscent of the structural adjustment programs long imposed on the global south by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. As the economic elite has seen its supply of exploitable poor countries dry up, they have refocused their attention on the United States, using mechanisms like ALEC as to help enact many of the same policies on states with governors and legislators firmly in their pocket. These policies include prison privatization, stripping collective bargaining rights, reducing or eliminating environmental protections, and enacting regressive tax laws.

Louisiana has been a principal focal point of ALEC’s education agenda in recent years, as best evinced in the decision to hold their annual meeting in the soupy August heat of New Orleans last year. Governor Jindal led a plenary session at the conference, and was joined in attendance by no less than 24 members of the state House, according to source material gathered by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Among them was Noble Ellington, a recently retired Republican representative who presided as National Chairman of ALEC at the time. In an interview with Democracy Now that week, he stated that it did not matter that corporations amounted to such a dominant presence at the ALEC meeting, because elected officials were in attendance as well: “We represent the public and we are the ones who decide. So the tax-paying public is represented there at the table, because I’m there”.

That model might work if the taxpayer were the politician’s sole benefactor. However, campaign disclosure records show that some 50 members of the state House together raised more than $500,000 in campaign funds from ALEC member corporations during the last cycle. This fact alone ought serve as sufficient evidence of the foolhardiness of Ellington’s characterization of lawmakers as independent arbiters. However, yet more proof is immediately available on the home page for the Louisiana Legislature. There, one finds a link to the ALEC website: an outrageous illustration of how embedded corporate governance has become. That someone thought it remotely appropriate to put the link in place and no one else found it potentially offensive speaks to a widespread acceptance of the primacy of business interests in the public sector. The political elite sees no inherent problem with a bargaining table composed of corporations, the politicians they support with vast campaign largesse, and an empty chair where the public ought be.

After all, removing the public from the public is precisely the intent of these reforms. The initial wave followed a devastating crisis, a la Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” and ensuing reforms have effectively institutionalized the crisis in Louisiana. This has been achieved by keeping the system in a perpetual state of flux. Schools are constantly opening, closing or changing hands, teacher retention rates are exceedingly low, and a number of different government authorities vie for oversight within the same geographic area.  Just understanding the organizational flow of the New Orleans public school system is a tall task. There are 16 schools under the direct management of the state-run Recovery School District (RSD), and 49 charters that fall under the state’s purview at the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). 26 of these charters belong to five separate networks that manage multiple schools, while the other 23 are part of independent non-network charters. Meanwhile, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) oversees nine non-network charters, and another two that are part of the same charter network as five schools that fall under the purview of the BESE. Meanwhile, the OPSB retains direct management of six schools: down from over 100 before Katrina hit.

Furthermore, the policy of tying teacher tenure to standardized test performance has added to this instability by greatly reducing teacher retention. A quick glance at empirical data on the number of first year teachers is quite revealing on this point. A recently published report by the Louisiana Board of Education (LBOE) provides this demographic information for the 2009-2010 school year. In the charter heavy RSD (37 of 70 total are charters), 619 of 2,237 teachers were in their first year. That comes out to roughly 27.7%, compared to a statewide rate of 10.7%. If the teacher tenure reforms accomplish anything, it is keeping the revolving door of personnel moving.

The continuous flow of new teachers is largely provided by non-profits like Teach for America and Teach Nola, each of which have supplied hundreds of rookie instructors since Katrina. These donor-subsidized salaries result in considerably lower cost to the state and charter operators, which many critics would surmise to be the primary intent of these reforms: chopping public sector salaries under the guise of improving the quality of education.

Teachers’ unions view the changes as a direct threat to the integrity of their vocation. The Louisiana Federation of Teachers’ (LFT) Director of Public Relations, Les Landon, spoke with me on this theme in particular: “We’re very concerned about what we see as the de-professionalization of teaching.” He raised the issue of removing the requirement that teachers be certified as one example of the move in this direction. However, the reliance on test results received the bulk of his criticism. He said: “Almost every decision on a teacher’s professional life is going to be based on student test scores. We think that’s a pretty terrible idea . . . What they are basically doing is trying to say that anybody can teach as long as you can get children to fill out the right bubbles on the test form.”

In that vein, New Orleans charters have fared better than their counterparts elsewhere in demonstrating measurable improvement in test scores. A study last year by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) showed that half of New Orleans’ charter schools were improving at a rate “significantly faster” than equivalent traditional schools. This broke with the national trend that showed charter schools performing slightly worse than their traditional counterparts. However, critics in New Orleans point to an inherent structural advantage on the part of charters. For example, some charters are selective enrollment, and most special-needs kids continue to enroll in traditional public schools. Furthermore, an achievement gap exists among charter schools, suggesting a replication of the same divisions long seen in traditional public schools.

What’s more, Landon argues that the current reforms will reverse any gains made in New Orleans’ charter system by eradicating the prevailing system of accountability. He explained that the CREDO study found that “the New Orleans charter schools were doing well because there was strict accountability on the issuance of charters . . . The Governor’s agenda this year virtually erases (this).” He notes that schools will no longer be required to provide fiscal reports with the LBOE, and instead will direct these reports to “charter authorizers.” These could be non-profit or corporate entities that create at least five charter schools, and then take over the oversight role currently assigned to the district. He is very candid on the implication of this reform: “What this bill does is open the floodgates to privatized education through the charter system.”

In fact, charter operators throughout the country have already proven adept at cashing in on their education endeavors.  An investigative report in the Miami Herald last October unveiled a range of charter school profiteers operating under the auspices of one of the most lenient charter laws in the country (former Gov. Jeb Bush is one of the most high-profile “School Choice” advocates). The authors detail one school, “The Academy of Arts and Minds,” that has been used as a lucrative source of business for founder Manuel Alonso-Poch. He charged $900,000 a year in rent, $150,000 for providing lunch, and $90,000 for handling the financial books during the last fiscal year. According to the report, charter schools have developed a reputation for this sort of activity, to the point of even attracting the watchful eye of the IRS.

The prospect for financial gain is likely the primary motivator of some of the most vocal supporters of these reforms. A scan through the board of directors of any of a number of charter operators reveals a veritable “Who’s Who” of American Aristocracy. For example, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which operates over 100 public charter schools throughout the country, boasts a significant list of billionaires. John Fisher, son of Gap clothing founders Doris and Don, sits atop as chairman. He is joined by his mother, as well as Carrie Walton Penner of the Walmart clan, Mark Nunnelly, managing director of Bain Capital, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom. Bill Gates has also been an active contributor to various charter reform efforts.

The education reform agenda has widespread corporate and political support, with members of both parties amongst its biggest advocates. At the highest level, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan previously oversaw an aggressive expansion of charter schools in Chicago while superintendent of that system from 2001-2009. Furthermore, he specifically lent Jindal his support for the recent appointment of state school czar John White, a charter advocate who previously managed the New Orleans system. Meanwhile, similar reforms are currently being debated from coast to coast: New Jersey, Hawaii and Washington state have seen similar legislative packages introduced during the current session. At the same time, the Florida Senate narrowly defeated a “Parent Trigger” bill last month, which would have granted parents the power to turn their children’s schools over to charters if it were failing and a majority of parents approved.

While that defeat is certainly encouraging, it is one of the few times these reforms have been beaten back, given their heavy bipartisan support. Meanwhile, the left tends to be focused elsewhere, such as bankster malfeasance, ending the imperial wars, resisting the encroaching police state, and so on. It is hard to pick one issue of “most importance,” but education should probably attract more attention. This is an issue that cuts to the soul of the country, as school plays a crucial role in cognitively programming  young people. A whole generation of children are set to be molded in a savage educational environment of resentful and frightened teachers, corporate executives playing the role of school administrators, and billionaires desperately trying to cash in on a vital public service. This seems likely to create an adult population that knows only the retrograde “every man for himself” ideology. It will also wipe out a large swath of the middle class, much of it black and/or female, that populate the ranks of the unionized inner-city teaching force. It will replace them with armies of young, naive “do-gooders” from Teach for America, set on educating the “savages” of the “urban ghettos.” The new education model is replete with economically backward ideology, racism, and union-busting.

New Orleans has had seven years to see how much this system stinks. Unfortunately, the rest of the country looks set to get their turn in the near future. ALEC and other reformers will continue to push this agenda in every state of the nation, and this will not stop until they have thoroughly emasculated the public, or vice versa.

With vague allusions to populist promises and admonition of his stubborn Republican opposition, the Great Capitulator ramped up his act like it was 2008 all over again. Memories of that agonizingly nauseating year abounded as mainstream liberals sang his praises. Among others, Michael Moore, of Ramsey Clark endorsement fame, was live on twitter with this: “Let’s give him an A- on this one. He lost points for saying that the IraqWar has made us “safer” & “more respected” around the world.” He gets just a minor reduction there for completely losing the “insight” he once claimed to have about the Iraq War being misguided, but otherwise gets Moore’s approval.

It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moore’s of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,”  but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “”liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies). Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation: “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.” On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes.  He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

(photo: Kevin Gebhardt-WHCI News, flickr)

Ahead of the overlapping G-8 and NATO summits in Chicago May 19th-21st Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ramped up the repression of principled dissent in a city that has quite the history of it. Just three months after closing down Occupy Chicago before it could even develop an overnight encampment, “Rahmbo” has introduced two new ordinances that would overhaul the city’s existing laws dealing with protests and parades. Dubbed by Occupy Chicago as the “Sit Down and Shut Up” ordinance, the measures include increased fines for resisting arrest, reduced opening hours for public parks, and much stricter parade regulations. Together, they are widely seen as an effort to stifle free speech under the guise of defending the public from unwieldy “anarchists.”

The mayor is keen on avoid adversity around meetings designed to elevate the status of a city long bent on shaking its “Second City” image. On the heels of Obama’s election in 2008, Chicago’s political establishment has sought to parlay their electoral triumph into a watershed moment for the city’s economic elite. After a disastrously failed Olympics bid, these twin meetings present the best opportunity to “showcase our extraordinary city to the world,” as Emanuel puts it. However, if these measures are any indication, it is Chicago’s shameful tradition of political repression that will be drawing all of the attention around the summits.

One ordinance ups the minimum fine for resisting arrest from $25 to $200, while the other adds an array of inordinately burdensome filing requirements to the existing parade law . Examples of the new obligations in the second ordinance include a mandate that organizers account for all “recording equipment, sound amplification equipment, banners, signs, or other attention-getting devices to be used in connection with the parade” at least a week prior. Furthermore, organizers will be required to appoint one “parade marshal” for every 100 participants.

As such, the ordinance does not draw a distinction between festival parades and political marches, which is obscene given that it is virtually impossible to accurately predict the number of participants in the latter, let alone control who might show up with a banner or a bullhorn. Compliance with the stipulations of this ordinance will be virtually impossible, and, yet, violations will see minimum fines increase 20-fold from $50 to $1000.

The mayor initially described the changes as temporary measures designed to address the presumed influx of protesters from throughout the world, though organizers adeptly noticed that the ordinances’ language would suggest otherwise. In fact, the only temporary change is the stipulation regarding the related spending authority. When the inconsistency was raised to Emanuel in a Press Conference, he replied: “I misspoke, and I take responsibility for the confusion.” However, protest organizers believe he made no “mistake,” and instead was intentionally being misleading.