Politics, Education, and Other Theoretical Rants . . .

by from the puggle
Tue Nov 28, 2006 at 02:27:03 AM EDT
Link to Orig.

[NOTE: This post is the second part of a series, so, if you want to go in order, I'd start with the one below it first.]

THOUGHTS ON HOW ‘EDUCATION’ PROMOTES INEQUALITY:So, yesterday I wrote this diary, and while I started at a sane hour of the night, I got done by like 4am, and so, not that many people read it. But those that read it, by and large, HATED IT! And I find that really, really interesting. Hence, a new diary.

Basically, I argued that the teaching of science, math, and literature, at least in the way we currently teach them, is all about making sure that enough people fail HS and their first two years of college, so that there’s a permanent underclass in this country to continue to work underpaid jobs, thereby perpetuating the class and to some extent the racial divide in this country.

So, yeah, the diary was a harsh screed, mostly against math and science education in this country, but also against literary study. So, for those who didn’t read the diary, I’ve spent years teaching all three subjects, the first two on a HS level, the second at HS and college levels. I love learning, I believe firmly in the need for interdisciplinary work, and I’m a committed student and teacher.

But I was amazed at just how much my views hit resistance. I think a lot of this can be explained by the fact that I was really putting forth a marxist point of view (or rather, my own take on marxist critiques of education in this country). And these ideas have been floating around in my brain more an more or late, but particularly in the last few years as I finished teaching HS math (algebra, geometry, trig) and science (bio, chem, physics), and devoted myself more to teaching college english. That said, I’ve taught a lot of other things as well - including lots of piano lessons to 5 yr olds. So, let me just state that out the outset - I’m lifelong curious learner, and I’m someone who is a dedicated teacher. But I STILL think that learning is one of the last things that happens in our schools.

Why? Well, let’s go back to the marxism stuff. I think that what we SAY we are doing in our educational system, and what we are ACTUALLY doing, are two VERY different things. I think what we SAY we are doing is producing ‘well rounded individuals’, and providing a ‘firm foundation in the liberal arts’. But what I think is really happening is that we are making sure that 1) students don’t get properly prepared in skills they might actually need after school, because 2) they spend too much time focusing on things they will never need, cannot see the eventual need for, and are relatively disconnected from their daily lifeworlds, and thus 3) creating a set of largely arbitrary hoops that people have to jump through to get diplomas, which are little more than certificates giving them access to social mobility. The way we touch these isolated subjects right now is so influenced by the 19th century division of subjects according to ‘rational’ critieria - namely, 19th century notions of science. But if we take capitalist exploitation into account, we need to think about the ways in which the production of ’subjects of knowledge’ serves to maintain social inequality today by keeping just enough people, without the benefit of tutors, private lessons, and the need not to work to support themsevles after age 16, outside the grasp of social capital.

THE ARGUMENT VIA EXAMPLES:
Let me sum this up with three examples: Jane Austen, quadratic equations, and covalent bonds. Oh, and the notion of HS ‘majors’ (which some schools are already shifting to).

Now, I’m happy that I know about all three of these things. I love to learn for the sake of it, I’m addicted to it. But I think when you try to force this approach to learning on people, you can really turn some people off, and this can have some very, very detrimental consequences. Here’s why:

JANE AUSTEN - I specialize in English lit. But if I didn’t, I would never have needed to know about her past HS. Why should students read this today in English class? Why is it that English class, which is where most students practice basic skills like reading and writing, concentrate on the ‘great’ works of literature to teach these skills? Wouldn’t it make more sense to either 1) teach basic reading and writing in things that students will need in their future, like newspapers, magazine, and website articles, which are the dominant form of consumption of information in today’s world? If you look at the history of the teaching of literature, it was tied to the production of certain ‘moral values’ (see my previous diary). But I remember reading the ‘classics’ of American literature in HS - I swear I must’ve read ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ nearly 5 times in various grades, and I never felt it got much better. Most importantly, however, I feel that fiction is a very poor way to teach students how to practice the sorts of comprehension skills that ‘everyone’ should know, nor how to write the sort of writing they most likely might need, in any profession (ie: business letters, letters to the editor, business proposals, academic essays, etc.). I think we need to REALLY question why it is we link the study of reading and writing with the study of literature. The only thing I can think of is history, as well as some sense of the desire to promote certain types of cultural morality (see diary). But if this is so, let’s either give classes in ethics, or, make literature an elective. That way, Jane Austen won’t serve as a gatekeeper to a college diploma. At least teach a contemporary author, like Richard Wright. If it were up to me, Shakespeare might be a HS elective, but it makes NO sense to me that people need to read Elizabethan english to graduate HS. And I LOVE Shakespeare, and Spenser even more. But in a country whose HS graduates often can’t write proper sentences, or comprehend a NY Times article, WHY the HELL do we teach Shakespeare? This should be an elective. Literature and the teaching of reading/writing in this country need to be separated.

My solution - use newspapers, magazine articles, and internet sources to teach reading and writing. Work up to comparing multiple newspaper articles on various subjects, to be able to read for bias. Work on writing similar articles about your own world. Start with journalism, and then work towards what most college have moved to, a HS level version of ‘writing across the disciplines’ - that is, have electives that tailor to broad areas students might want to pursue, and they practice writing while learning skills towards a HS level ‘major’. So, ‘writing for business careers’, ‘writing in humanities (this is where they’d read their precious shakespeare, and in historical context!), ‘writing for science careers’, ‘writing for social science careers,’ etc.

QUADRATIC EQUATIONS - I’ve taught thousands of kids how to do these. But I fail to see any reason why they should know them. Nor do they. And this is what I see as the big problem with math education today. Math is completely divorced from context, and taught as an abstract set of puzzles. And since most HS math can be summed up in to one solid intro college course, why do we make ALL students learn these quadratic equations to graduate HS? I think to weed people out. But if we don’t even teach students what they are used for, why teach them? This is why I think that the ONLY math students should learn should be in CONTEXT. But that means radically rethinking our math curriculums, which are now based on covering abstract subject areas like ‘algebra’ or ‘trigonometry’. Rather, once students get to HS, there should be ‘math across the disciplines,’ so that you have, ‘math in architecture, building, and construction’, ‘math for computers’, ‘mathematical statistics in politics and gov’t', ‘math for health sciences’, etc. You’ll hit a LOT of the same math this way, but only as needed to solve SPECIFIC problems. Never again will students ask why they need this stuff, because they will have chosen one of the 4-5 tracks of math offered by their school, all of which can come in levels.

COVALENT BONDS - Why do we teach bio, chem, and physics to people who will likely never specialize in this stuff? Don’t get me wrong, I feel its so important that we learn some basics of the world around us - but nobody, NOBODY who doesn’t later specialize in this stuff should be required to learn about covalent bonds, let alone fail out of HS because of them. That’s why I think that after a basic one-year general science class, you make science only a requirement for those who pursue HS majors which specialize in science or health professions. And even then, you tailor the science classes so they line up with the math you chose. So, if you choose, ‘math for architecture, building, and contruction’, you could take ’science for architecture, building, and construction’, and that way, they get some chemistry, some ecology, some physics, but only to solve SPECIFIC PROBLEMS.

MAJORS - IN HIGH SCHOOL? - so, can we do this, without having schools go crazy? If we divide up HS into VERY basic majors, we can do this. Let’s say we do the following: health and life sciences, business and computers, mechanical sciences (engineering, building, construction, architecture), humanities (literature, history), social sciences (psychology, economics, sociology, statistics), law/politics/govt. That’s FIVE basic departments, encompassing five major areas that most careers can be seen as vaguely falling into. Using these as lenses, rather than abstract entities like ‘history, literature, math’, you create clusters of knowledge that cross disciplines, and can be directed to the GENERAL career path students are interested in. So, you only learn quadratic equations if you plan to go into mechanical sciences (maybe you want to be a landscape architect), or, you only learn shakespeare if you see yourself going into the humanities. This isn’t to say get rid of literature all together, because you can integrate it into other majors - EACH major should likely have all the major previous ’subject areas’ in it. So, if you study business and computers, your ‘reading and writing for business and computers’ could include literature on robber barrons or globalization to talk about corporate ethics, and in the humanities classes, your classes might go into the chemistry of paint, paper, bronze, arts preservation, printing, etc.

THE GOAL, however, is to make sure that math, science, literature, and non-20th century history are not used as abstract hurdles to weed out enough people so that the capitalist class has a class of unskilled laborers to exploit. Rather, we need to focus on READING and WRITING as the basic skills whereby people learn about the world (yes, including learning more math and science!), and stop thinking about math and science fields separate from what they’re used for.

by from the puggle
Mon Nov 27, 2006 at 03:01:55 AM EDT
Link to Orig.

ON THE DANGERS OF AN AMERICAN ‘EDUCATION’:
I think education in this country is a crock. To quote a popular book of late, it is yet one more of the ‘greatest stories ever sold.’ I think that the role of education in this country right now has by and large one major function - to make sure that a whole lot of people fail and drop out before getting one of the ‘brass rings,’ called ‘diplomas’, that can grant financial and social mobility and opportunity. Education serves mostly, as far as I can tell, to maintain rather than lessen class and racial divides.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a professional educator, having taught college level English, HS math and science, standardized test-taking skills, and I even gave piano and guitar lessons to 5yr olds. I love learning, and I’m a professional student.

But what I’m going to argue is that our country needs enough people to fail HS so that we will haven enough unskilled workers to work at McDonalds and the like. And nothing like trigonmetric equations, Jane Austen, or covalent bonds to help make this a reality. More below.

Ok, this is going to seem like a raging attack on math and science education, at least until near the end. But don’t worry, I’ll criticize the liberal arts soon enough. But a bit about me first - I’m a college English prof, and a brand new one at that (woohoo!). And I’ve taught a hell of a lot of intro college level writing/composition classes. I also briefly taught HS english and music, and I taught GRE and SAT standardized test classes for The Princeton Review on the side. But the experience that really speaks to what I’m writing about here is the nearly 15 years I spent working weekends to make money part-time as I went to school. I worked for a private tutoring company, teaching NYS Regents review exam courses in HS Chemistry, Biology, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, in addition to working one on one with literally thousands of students over the years.

THE QUESTION - WILL THEY EVER USE WHAT THEY LEARN?:
So, every year I tutored math and science, my students asked me the same thing - when will I ever use this stuff again later in life? And my answer was always something like this: probably never, except if they make you study it in college, or you plan on being a doctor, chemist, biologist, etc. When I asked them if they planned to go into any of those professions, they generally said no.

Then I’d get the next question, and a much harder one to answer: THEN WHY DO I NEED TO LEARN THIS STUFF? WHAT’S THE POINT?

To some of my students, I’d give the easy answer: ‘Because they say you need to know this stuff to get a HS diploma. Just consider it a set of random exercises, and if you complete them, they’ll give you cool stuff at the end. And your parents will be off your back, and we’ll all be much happier’.

But that’s a bit disingenous. But if I told some of them what I really thought, I’d feel we’d be off on a tangent, one that I very much wanted to talk about, while they were very likely just expressing frustration, and figured a rhetorical question the best way to vent their annoyance at, say, graphing cosine curves.

But sometimes I’d get a student who was asking with a bit more umph, or with whom I had a sense that they were actually asking the question with a desire to know what the hell this was all for. Then I might say something like this: “You will likely never need to know this stuff ever again. Now, if you listen to what math educators say about why you should learn this stuff, it actually doesn’t have to do with the particular math skills per se. Rather, solving problems with multiple possible answering and several ways in which they can be solved teaches advanced problem solving skills that you might need later in life. So, let’s say your boss at work in the future asks you to solve a complex problem. The logic is that studying math will help you develop your ‘complex task problem-solving’ muscle, and thus, you can apply this to any area you pursue later in life. That said, they couldn’t used ANY topic to teach you this, so long as it requires you to juggle multiple ways to solve problems, in fields ranging from computer science to logic or whatever. The argument, however, is that math is the most ‘contentless’, the most ‘universal’, and hence, develops problem solving skills that can be applied to any field you go into, because its not so much conderned with content, as it is with the form of problem solving. Science teaches similar skills, just in a more hands on kind of way”

Of course, I don’t buy that bullshit, but it IS what a lot of education professionals will give as a rationale for our current system. But every so often, I got a student who then posed the next logical question: “But then, why don’t they just teach us real life situations with complex tasks that will be similar to the tasks we’ll face in the workforce?”

If I got that far, then I’d size up my student, and whether or not it made sense to go into a lefty tirade for a little bit - remember, these are HS students. But some I knew would be receptive to this, and I saw it as educational in its own way, so, I didn’t feel that badly about it. If that was the case, I’d answer with something like this: “Well, I think your really right to ask that question. Not all countries run their educational systems like ours. In fact, in much of Europe, you choose whether or not you want to go to a ‘professional ‘ HS which is specialized in a specific area, say, computers or finance or marketing or auto repair or construction, while if you plan to go to college afterwards, you apply to an ‘academic’ HS, which teaches what our HS’s here in America teach, a broad, liberal arts education. But it is taught at a much higher level, because everybody there wants this sort of thing, and afterwards, people go into college and study only their major, having most of the wide liberal arts degree behind them in HS. `Often college is 5 or 6 years, but instead of a BA, you get done with an MA. So, the US system is only one of many. But if you want my opinion, I think the reason why they make you learn all the stuff they do is because it perpetuates current social power’.

SOME HISTORY - THE ‘LIBERAL’ ARTS AND SOCIAL POWER:
Here’s where I either stop once the eyes glaze over, or possibly continue if I see interest, or if they ask ‘why’: “So, in answer to the question why, here’s what I think. A very, VERY small percentage of the population is going to need math beyond fractions and percents later in life, if not some very, VERY basic algebra skills. I can even see the logic in teaching sin/cos/tan functions of the most basic sort, but even then, only to carpenters and designers, so, maybe not even that. The point is, the large majority of the population that ISN’T going to be doctors or scientists will never need this stuff, ever again. But nearly everybody has to take it. Now, a lot of this has to do with the space race and the early 1960’s, when Sputnik went into orbit, Krushchev said ‘we will bury you!’, and everyone was worried that we didn’t have enough math and science people to not get crushed by the technology of the Russians (which was a crock of shit to those in the gov’t who knew the extent of Russian technology in the 1950’s, but that’s a whole different story). Point is, the original reason why math and science teaching was pursued so stridently was because it was designed to prepare large amounts of the country to be funnelled into the military-industrial complex. It also defined a set of ‘hard, masculine’ subjects of study, in distinction to the ’softer’ disciplines of the humanities (which were much more socially dangerous, full of strange ideas). It also had the benefit of turning education, a very slippery process, into something quantifiable. And policy wonks always like this. it is infinitely easier to measure the quality of education by advancement in math or science. That said, I’ve got my major doubts that this does the majority of those who are forced to learn these often very difficult subjects any good later in life.

What it does serve to do, however, is perpetuate privilege. By setting the bar for a HS diploma higher by involving subjects divorced from any relation to a particular person’s future, an arbitrary set of hurdles are created. And this isn’t JUST in terms of math and science. Literature is also in the same boat. Students come out of HS not knowing how to write properly, and their reading skills are often not that great, but while you would think they’d work on helping students read things they’ll actually see later in life, like newspapers or reports or things like that, no, they teach Shakespeare and Jane Austen, who are completely divorced from contemporary life in America today. I don’t know anyone who got through HS English without being forced to read at least one play by Shakespeare, like it or not. But this too is a product of history.

To the early proponents of teaching the ‘English classics’ to the masses, the issue was one of MORALITY, not reading skills. Shakespeare was seen as a way to have students learn multiple points of view as a way of moderating their moral sentiments, refining them, learning to form consensus and have respect for tradition, and to defer hasty judgement. For Matthew Arnold, one of the leading proponents of this idea in the 1870’s, English literature should be taught to the working classes to teach refined morals of the upper classes, to teach the classics that were part of the social capital needed for social class mobility (even if that was somewhat a fiction), and provide a stepping stone whereby the working classes would at least fancy themselves able, if they learned enough Shakespeare and Milton, to join the ‘cultured’. And Arnold makes this very clear, in fact, he argues that the reason why we need literature is to unifty the state, provide a glue for public morals now that religion is failing, and to stop the working class from going to these pesty new things they call ’strikes’. Even the title of his book encapsulates the choice he saw facing the england of the 1870’s. “Culture and Anarchy.” Its thus no accident that the study of English started in the Mechanics Institutes, but there wasn’t a professor or English literature at Oxford or Cambridge Universities until the 1880’s, and full departments teaching in earnest until the 1930’s and the need for cultural nationalism to fight the Germans. Still, when the englishmen went to the colonies , or fought the Germanic Huns, it was their Shakespeare and Milton, held close to heart, which let them know that it was they who possesed what Kipling famously called ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (ok, their toiletries and grooming methods also served to mark these boundaries as well, hence the famous racialized campaigns for soap in the 1880’s and 90’s). Teaching literature was all about social power. And largely, it remains that way to this day, at least to the extent that it is REQUIRED of all students. Even today, in most collleges, the primary way students learn better fluency with writing is via majoring in English, which generally means reading a hell of a lot of LITERATURE. Now, for those who plan to pursue PhD’s in literature, that’s great. But for those who want to get a degree in English, why does that mean they need to know Shakespeare, or Wordsworth, or even fiction at all? Why not newspapers, journalism, film, or the types of writing they may encounter in their fields of specialization?

THE PRACTICAL STUFF - HOW THE MYTH OF ‘EDUCATION’ IS USED TO KEEP PEOPLE POOR:
Back to HS, however, what literature, science, and math education do in this country is not prepare people for later life in the workplace - if that were so, we’d be eding closer to the European system. No, they serve to make sure that ENOUGH PEOPLE FAIL HIGH SCHOOL, AND THE REST CAN’T GET THROUGH THE REMEDIAL MATH AND READING CLASSES AT OUR COMMUNITY COLLEGES. The rich and privileged, of course, can get tutors, and even if they have no interest, they can be pushed through these things, largely because they don’t have to work while going to school. But why take a class in remedial math, when you can’t pay the bills, and need to work more hours? It only makes sense to drop outt afte while, when education is so pointsless in regard to one’s future. What I feel is that this is in fact the very point. That is, the purpose of school is to be as disconnected from your future as possible. That is, at least until you choose a major in the second half of your BA. But by then, a large percent of the population has been weeded out, under the myth of the ‘liberal arts education’ and the ‘well rounded individual’.

Now, if you want truly well rounded individuals, you look at skills that would make one well rounded in today’s world, not previous ones. Teach the US constitution, and contemporary world and US politics, gov’t, and cultures, and at least 20th century history, to produce better citizens. Teach writing and reading in various areas, not only fiction and literature, with a focus on journalism, comparing multiple newspapers to read between the lines, writing op-ed pieces and have writing classes tailored to what students ‘major’ in in HS - yup, in HS. Even classes in public speaking, presentations, group work, spreadsheets, power-point - the sorts of skills that almost everyone might use at some point in most non-physical careeers. But get rid of all math past first year, and requiring science and literature for all, or at best, reduce the requirement to one year each, and make anything else optional. Yes, of course this will require changing the standardization of teacher training in this country, and require HS’s to be more flexible in the subjects offered. And yes, it does make it difficult for someone to switch tracks down the line, but that’s why you need to provide courses designed for just that (ie: “math for those who want to be doctors but majored in something else in HS”). As anyone who works in college education will tell you, just about any college level remedial course covers about as much as three years of HS study combined.

But what about those who say we already have too many students languishing in remedial classes in community colleges in this country? Well, that’s because 1) many of these classes teach math that, for most colllege majors, students will never need again, or 2) because students didn’t spend enough time on reading and writing in earlier years, and instead spent their time on Shakesepare, or covalent bonds. But aside from a basic survey to let students out there know these subject exist, neither Shakespeare of covalent bonds should EVER be required for a HS diploma.

PERPETUATING INEQUALITY THROUGH THE MYTH OF THE ‘WELL-ROUNDED INDIVIDUAL’::
But with the system set up the way it is now, we’ve got a system of arbitrary hurdles, designed BECAUSE they have no relevance, to make a large enough percent of the population fail, so that it perpetuates an unskilled labor force in this country. In doing so, the purpose of education in this country isn’t to provide opportunity and social mobility, but rather, to make it as difficult as possible. Otherwise, who will work at McDonalds? So-called ‘illegal’/immigrant labor? But since the poor in this country have traditionally been from racialized groups, this policy has the added effect of not only keeping large segments of the poor in this country from having mobility, but also, it keeping the racial divide in this country from changing, in that it is primarilly people of color who can’t afford $40/hour private tutors to help them pass - a norm in many affluent US suburbs.

And this is why I think education in this country is about perpetuating inequality, and why when I hear republicans only pushing math and science education, I think to myself - that’s cold-war hold-over mentality, or closet racism. Not that most educators want this, but I think that all we’ve all been raised in an educational ideology designed by those who are at the top of the system - not those at the bottom, and its only natural for those at the top to want society to mirror them, and thereby perpetuate the status quo. But I think if we want a more egalitarian society, getting quadratic equations OUT of our HS requirements is a great place to start.

WHAT DO STUDENTS REALLY NEED TO NAVIGATE TODAYS WORLD?:
That said, I still feel that much larger changes are required - this diary has been about curriculum, not education per se. As most educators will tell you, they often aren’t allowed to truly teach the way they would want to. What we do isn’t educate, as much as indoctrinate what is ‘supposed to be taught’. Only when students get to have a hand in shaping their own curriculums, planning the tasks for the class to accomplish for the semester (can you picture a class on government where the STUDENTS get to set the agenda, and the teacher is nothing but a resource and coordinator? Talk about teaching research skills, complex problem solving, etc.!!), will our education become truly a participatory process in which people create their own growth, become invested in the means more than the ends, feel empowered rather than discouraged by what they learn, and truly produce a radically democratic pedagogy. Of course, this would throw standardized testing out the window. But this is all material best saved for another diary.

For now, let me leave this diary with a famous quote by Oscar Wilde: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” The first step towards an educational system that truly desires to either educate, create social and class opportunity and mobility, or both, is perhaps to debunk the myth that what we do now in our schools is education, or the production of ‘well rounded individuals’. Education is always dependent upon those in power deciding what sort of stuff is worth knowing. For those of us who believe it is the path rather than the goal which is important, making sure the path isn’t full of completely arbitrary hurdles which serve no purpose but to weed people out is essential to creating a more democratic system of ‘education’. Or at least, that’s my opinion.

by from the puggle
Wed Nov 29, 2006 at 01:39:05 AM EDT
Link to Orig.

So, I’ve been writing a bit about education lately, mostly because I posted one diary, and nobody liked it, and so I expanded upon it, and got a similar response, all of which has me reallllly curious. Now, I’ve always thought DailyKos a pretty lefty kinda place. But maybe not euro-style lefty? But I’ve been lately espousing the view on this site that various aspects of the educational system in this country perpetuate inequality - not because they are underfunded, but because of WHAT they teach, not only HOW. And this has led me to a realization - is the myth of the liberal arts education/well-rounded individual still alive?

I think this myth hurts kids and creates a relatively static class of the disempowered in our society. If this interests you, please read and comment below, cause I’m curious why my ideas are getting such resistance on a site like DKos . . .

I’ll be upfront - I’m a nyc english prof with a background in philosophy, cultural studies, critical theory, that sorta thing. But aside from theory classes, I’ve taught a bunch of intro reading/composition courses, I’ve been an adjunct, was a private tutor for over 15 yrs teaching individuals and classes HS math and science, taught SAT/GRE prep classes for princeton review, was briefly a HS English and Music teacher, and taught lots of 5 yr olds to play piano. I love education, I’m a lifelong student and I’m devoted to teaching my courses to encourage a creative, engaged, activist relation to the world.

But I’ve been lately espousing the view on this site that various aspects of the educational system in this country perpetuate inequality - not because they are underfunded, but because of WHAT they teach, not only HOW.

So, this is a continuation of my two previous diaries, but I’m trying not to repeat but rather respond to feedback and rework so these ideas can evolve. So, this time, I’m going to take the ‘liberal arts education myth’ as my line of attack. And I’m gonna state this in proposition form, for easy access, and to streamline for comments.

1. MOST OF WHAT WE TEACH STUDENTS IN SCHOOL, BEYOND READING, WRITING, AND BASIC MATH THEY DON’T USE IN THEIR FUTURE JOBS. Statistically this can’t but be true. Doctors will never use Shakespeare at work, nor will literature professors use physics. So, we must be doing something in school beyond producing people for the job market.

2. A HS and COLLEGE DIPLOMA ARE NECESSARY TO GET ACCESS TO SOCIAL MOBILITY IN THIS COUNTRY. Without these basics, you can’t get most high paying jobs, have little access to economic security, and generally lack acces to social and economic capital. And numerous studies have shown that the greatest indicator which correlates to academic success of one’s children is your income (for a variety of reasons).

3. WHAT KEEPS MOST PEOPLE FROM MOVING UP THE TYPE OF JOB THEY GET ISN’T THE SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE FOR THE JOB IN QUESTION, BUT RATHER, A DIPLOMA.

4. OUR SOCIETY DESIRES TO MAKE ‘WELL ROUNDED INDIVIDUALS’ BY MEANS OF A ‘LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION.’ I can’t think of any reason why everyone who goes through HS needs to know how to graph a cosine curve in math class. If the reason were to form advanced thought processes needed for later careers, we would follow the european system, and teach advanced thinking skills in the general areas (health sciences, business, humanities, social sciences, mechanical sciences, law and gov’t) of people’s eventual areas of specialization by 2nd year of HS, and not teach conic sections to future psychologists who might find statistics more useful.

5. THE BROAD FOUNDATION IN THE LIBERAL ARTS AIMS TO PROVIDE CHOICE FOR PEOPLE TO CHOOSE PROFESSIONS LATER. But a LOT of people don’t even get to this point, they need to work two or three jobs while young, and school is a real long term investment, and doesn’t pay financial dividends any time soon. So, for so many, unless they are learning skills that will directly lead to employment, school looks really detached from living in today’s society, particularly because in our Wal-Mart/HMO culture, there’s no safety net. So, lots of people don’t finish HS, and many don’t get a four year degree (which usually at least comes with a major that has some relation to the job market).

6. A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS SUPPOSED TO ALSO PRODUCE GENERALLY AWARE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. But if that were really our goal, why do we teach HS and college general education requirements the way we do? Why do we teach reading and writing via fiction, when most of the writing needed EITHER for future employment or being an aware member of society in today’s world are not fiction? Why all the Shakespeare? Does this really make better political citizens (no, that would be studying newspapers and magazines to learn to read multiple versions of the same story and read between the lines), informed citizens (no, that would be non-fiction works on, say, economics or social issues, or history as it directly impacts today’s major social issues), or is this rather about creating some sort of ‘moral’ values that can be granted by ‘classic literature’ (according to the history of English instruction, this is the original reason English lit was taught in school, as substitute religion in the late 19th century). And if general math and science literacy were aimed at for those who want to pursue careers in social science or humanities, why don’t we teach these subjects as they relate to key issues of the day (ie: math in elections, science and the changing ecology, the science of global warming, sustainibility, the math of national economics) rather than abstract divisions of alegebra, trignometry, chemistry, physics (these divisions come from the 19th century as well!).

7. IF A LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION, AS IT IS CURRENTLY STRUCTURED IN THIS COUNTRY, AIMS TO PREPARE STUDENT FOR THE WORK WORLD, OR PRODUCE GENERALLY AWARE CITIZENS, IT WOULD BE STRUCTURED DIFFERENTLY. What I’m arguing is that the way things are currently divided, neither of these goals are acheived effectively. Students learn deconstextualized topics like quadratic equations and jane austen, because our subjects are organized not around their impact on either of these concerns, but rather around a 19th century typology of the ‘divisions of knowledge’, wherey math only relates to math, literature only to literature. In doing so, they often spend time on lots of topics that neither relate to their eventual career fields, nor being well rounded in a way that is relevant to navigating today’s world, as opposed to that of the 19th century.

8. IF CAREER PREP AND AWARE MEMBER OF TODAY’S WORLD AREN’T BEING DONE WELL, THEN WHAT ARE WE DOING? Certainly not teaching basic skills like reading, writing, or basic math. Our curriculums are too broad to do these things well. We teach jane austen to people who have trouble with the NY Times as a way to produce reading or writing skills. Why do we do this? And why do we focus on teaching quadratic equations to ALL students, when we could be teaching economics to future business people, in HS, and computer skills to budding lawyers? Why don’t our HS students have firmer foundation in BASIC skills, then skip this ‘liberal arts stuff’, then take general ed courses DESIGNED for their interdisciplinary relevance to today’s world (ie: reading and writing on current events, math and the economy, science and the environment, politics and the social environment), and then MOVE ON TO A HS MAJOR - so at least people come out with a specialization?

9. ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL. Most people who come out of HS having learned trig and Jane Austen will NEVER use them again - statistically speaking. Neither of them really enhance your ‘general awareness’ of how to be adapted to today’s world, unless you specialize in areas that need them (my mom got by fine wihut Jane Austen). And if you want to respecialize, say, you did your HS major in Humanities and you decided you want to be a doctor, one college level class can cover nearly all HS math in one course, and usually in a way specifically directed at their major (ie: statistic for pscyhologists). So, WHY do we teach these subjects equally to everyone? Is it just easier to crank out teachers that way? I think there’s something more . . .

10. IF OUR CURRENT MODE OF SECONDARY EDUCATION ISN’T REALLY BASED ON CAREER PREP OR PRODUCING MORE GENERALLY PREPARED MEMBERS OF TODAY’S WORLD (either would be done much better, structurally, if that were really the case) - THEN WHY DO WE TEACH THINGS THIS WAY?? For me, that’s the million dollar ques.

11. MY ANSWER: THE REASON WHY WE TEACH THING THIS WAY IS SO THAT THERE’S RELATIVELY ARBITRARY, OFTEN POINTLESS SEEMING (certainly to students, and potentially to some skeptical adults as well) HURDLES, DESIGNED SO THAT ITS DIFFICULT ENOUGH FOR ENOUGH PEOPLE TO FAIL, BUT INEFFICIENT TO REALLY PROVIDE THE SKILLS FOR SOCIAL MOBILITY. Now, why would we do something like
that?

12. TO PERPETUATE CLASS-INEQUALITY (and this often ties into issues of race inequity as well) BY PROVIDING A PERMANENT SERVICE CLASS THAT GETS TRAPPED IN DEAD END JOBS BUT STILL BUYS ENOUGH PRODUCTS TO FUND THE CONSUMER DRIVEN ECONOMY. So, you give people just enough to buy basic products, but not enough to get real security and true social mobility. People need to stay in the lowermiddleclass if the Cheney’s of the world are to get super-rich. Now, I don’t think they set school policy. But they do block the sort of legistlation that would promote real change in our schools. But I also think that we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Not by some evil conglomerate. But I think that the 19th century ideas, formed by a rising middle class of capitalist industrialists has remained with us, and with them, its values. I think its time we ask what our education REALLY does in this country, with 20th century, progressive values in mind. I think we need to shift closer to the European system, make sure people come out of HS with majors, radically revise our conception of providing students with ‘breadth’, and radically rethink WHY we teach Jane Austen and the structural properties of spring tension to everybody, as opposed to future specialists. Aren’t Richard Wright and ecology/sustainibility more important to MOST students? Are we sure we’re not just providing arbitrary hurdles that actively take people away from really geting enough practice on basic skills, or skills that might make them aware of political issues when they vote, or get what it means when the Fed talks, or skills that could at least get them jobs?

PS -If you’re a teacher and you post comments, keep in mind, I’m an english instructor, yet I’m really decimating the rationale behind teaching literature as the primary template for reading/writing in ‘english’ classes. A lot of comments I’ve gotten emphasize things llike ’science surrounds us’, or ‘math is everywhere’, or ‘how are we going to compete’. But I think a lot of these mantras, while true in their own way, just show that we too were raised in this system. My question is, despite our passions and loves developed in this system, does this system really serve our students as much as it serves us as teachers who of course want to teach the stuff we spent all that time learning? But is this what they need? How would we know?

by from the puggle
Thu Nov 30, 2006 at 09:38:42 PM EDT
Link to Orig.

MARXISM - A DIRTY WORD . . .:
There was a time in US history when many of those of us who today describe ourselves as the ‘progressive left’ would’ve instead used terms like communist, socialist, or trotskyist. This ended as people figured out in the mid30’s that Stalin was having show trials, running gulags, etc. That’s why many switched from the ‘Popular Front against fascism’ to trotskyism, but by the McCarthy era, the only safe term left to describe oneself on the NCL, the ‘non-communist left’, was ‘liberal; - which linked democratic freedom with capitalism and the free market. The CIA spent a lot of money providing a ‘left alternative’ to make sure people didn’t go over to communism. Many of the NCL of the 1950’s - Koestler, Hook, Spender - would today be called conservatives, and one of the major grandfathers of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, was originally strongly involved with Trotskyism and the NCL.

Despite a decades long propaganda movement AGAINST any sort of marxist related ideas in US politics, in most other countries of the world (and to some extent, the faculty in US universities), there is an obvious link between marxist IDEAS and leftist politics. But in this country, it is LIBERALISM, not marxism, which is seen as the major leftist movement. But does the progressive left need to start questioning liberalism?

So, I’ve been blogging here a lot on education lately, and I’ve been taking a pretty marxist approach, rather than a liberal one. And this has been very controversial, and it has made me realize that even though I barely used any marxist language or terms, the very nature of my ideas were a bit, well, shocking to a lot of people on the site. Which is why I figured it made sense to write a diary - Liberalism or Marxism? Of course, my answer would be ‘both please!’. But let me get more specific.

MARXISM and ‘RADICAL DEMOCRACY’:
During the recent survey on this site, I described my particular political description as ‘radical democratic market socialist progressive’. I do NOT think that any sort of socialism should take away democratic rights, the ideas contained in the ‘Bill of Rights’ or the ‘Declarations of the Rights of Man.’ Like a lot of ‘radical democracy’ theorists, I think that the American revolution was a great START to the ‘democratic revolution’, in which the need for political freedom was first given a real institutional form - after which Marx articulated the need for forms of social and economic justice that need be a part of this. I see the social movements of the 1960’s and forward, which are often called the ‘new social movements’ - the civil rights movement, gay and lesbian rights movement, women’s movement, etc., as extensions of the project begun by figures like Paine and Marx. ‘Women of Color’ and ‘Transnational Feminism’ I see as yet one more continuation of this, as are queer movements, anti-globalization movements, indymedia, and immigrants rights movements.

I see democracy as an unfinished project, something which is not owned by any particular country, document, or set of thinkers. But I think that ‘liberalism’, itself in many senses a product of the NCL of the Cold-War era, is ultimately limiting for the left today. And I think there is where some areas of marxist critique can be particularly helpful. That is, WITHOUT notions like violent revolution, or dictatorship of the proletariat. I think that Ganhdi and Martin Luther King, and the entire notion of civil disobediance, are essential components of the history of democracy. Nearly any bad government can be brought to its knees non-violently. If everybody doesn’t go to work the next day, a so-called ‘general strike’, almost any government, even one with close ties to the military, will be forced to take notice. So long as there is freedom of speech and communication, only our own belief that ‘the system is working’ keep us complacent with this system. All of which is why I’m shocked and surprised that during the Bush regime, there weren’t widespread mass protests that lead to those behind the scenes ’summoning’ Bush and Cheney (as Saudia Arabia did this week!), to tell them they are jeopardizing profits. The only reason why I can think of WHY there weren’t MASSIVE protests of Bush policies was that they had captured enough of the ‘hearts and minds’ of this country. I don’t doubt that most of us here at Kos were there protesting. But we simply aren’t enough.

That said, I think that liberalism holds us back. And that’s why I’m excited by the word ‘progressive’, because I think it doesn’t carry some of the same historical baggage. I’m excited by what this term can be. But i hope it means more than liberalism.

AGAINST ‘LIBERALISM’:
But what makes Marxism DIFFERENT than liberalism? Marxism is MATERIALIST, while liberalism is IDEALIST. Here’s what I mean. Liberals speak of things in universal terms, like ‘the human condition,’ ‘a liberal arts education,’ ‘the free market’ - as if these things were a given. It places emphasis upon freedom, rather than equallity. Marxism believes that all ideas are as much products of a society as are things like cars, ipods, or any other commodity. So, it moves us to ask - WHEN and HOW did these notions come about? What sort of society created the values of things like ‘the free market’ or ‘a liberal arts education’. And since the victors almost always write the histories in their own image, might these notions reflect dominant power structures, rather than things which really serve ALL people? This is why Marxism is MATERIALIST. Marxism believes that ideas are PRODUCTS of a society, rather than universally true. It sees all ideas as PRODUCED, rather than eternal truths which are ‘discovered’.

What are the effects of this difference? It allows us to pose the question - how did we GET the ideas we fight for? Do they support, even against our better intentions, those who were in power when our formative experiences shaped us? Marxism assumes that a ’social unconscious’ is always lurking underneath our statments. So, whenever the word ‘free market’ comes out our mouths as if this were an obvious concept, we need to think - might this very term contain an IDEOLOGY?

THE ‘FREE’ MARKET:
A term like ‘free market’ is laden with ideology, in that it links the ‘free market’ with concepts like ‘freedom of speech’. But these are in many ways opposed concepts - as we all know, a completely free market ERODES freedom of speech (ie: Clear Channel, media conglomeration in the US). But this is how the language we use to conceptualize things shapes our thoughts. Taking this apart, thinking about how we ourselves are PRODUCTS of a society that has shaped us in its own image - THIS is a marxist idea. Questioning the very terms that allowed us to come to be who we are, THIS is a marxist idea. I’m not advocating a return to anything like Soviet style communism, or anything that abrogates democracy. Radical democracy theory works to take the BEST of democratic thought, and the best of the marxist TRADITION of thinkers (not just marx, but people like Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Ernst Bloch, etc.) It also doesn’t throw capitalism out completely. Limited, controlled capitalism can be useful - so long as it is a means to an end (helping people), rather than the other way around.

DEMOCRACY OUTSIDE THE ‘LIBERAL’ BOX:
Liberalism convinces us that we are isolated individuals who then enter a public sphere as free agents of competition. Marxism makes us question this, helps us to see that the playing field is NOT even in our society, the free market is anything but free, and that what we think are our own ideas were put there by those who got there before us. Marxism argues that freedom STARTS with the realization that the very ideas in your head are not your own, thereby allowing you to question how much you’ve been shaped by concepts, and they run you, rather than you running them. Marxist critique allows you more choice about the terms you use, posing the question of the social situation in which they were produced, and if other ideas might allow you to become a different person. For example, when you shift from ‘the private sphere’ to ‘the military/prion/industrial complex’ you don’t merely change words - you change the linkage between pieces of the world. Liberalism argues for eternal truths which just have different names. Marxism sees languge as creative, productive, and reality as maleable.

This is, of course, a bit scary to a lot of people. When I teach students russian history, for example, most of them think communism simply IS totalitarianism, and marxism is a set of ideas which justify this particular form of totallitarianism. And there’s no question that in certain communist societies, that’s true. There are aspects of Lenin’s thought, and even Marx’s, that structurally lead to this. That said, radical democracy theory has TWO foundations - the democratic revolution, AND the marxist one. It believes that if you lose EITHER of these, you lose foundational freedoms, and that real social change in this world today needs include POLITICAL, SOCIAL, and ECONOMIC justice. And that liberalism is too tied to the history of the ‘free market’ and its terms - rugged individual, liberal arts education, free agent, nuclear family - which serve to separate what are actuallly connected phenomena. Capitalism and governments created in its image work by ‘divide and conquer’ - if everyone looks out for themselves society will work out fine due to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. But unless each divided group - those given the shaft by society due to race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, immigration status - work together, none of these groups have enough separate ability to create real change. That’s why we need some LARGE, BIG IDEAS which can unite these groups. I think SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, and POLITICAL FREEDOM FROM OPPRESSION are a great start.

Just like markets constantly diversify, so capitalism diversifies - that’s what it does, divides and separates, creates divisions of labor, specialization, myopias of various sorts, each of us become more and more a cog in the system. But for us to make the system serve us, rather than having us serve it, we need to be able to reunify what it has made separate. Seeing the big picture, historically, culturally, and socially, requires that we constantly ask ourselves - are we only seeing what is in front of our noses? I think liberalism limits the left. It limits us by terms like ‘citizen’ instead of ‘human being’, ‘free market’ instead of ‘unregulated corporate cash’, ‘illegal alien’ rather than ‘hard working human being,’ ‘personal self-interest’ rather than ‘myopia’, ‘nuclear family’ rather than ‘non-extended family’, ‘family values’ rather than ‘neo-fundamentalist religiosity’, ‘property rights’ rather than ‘did you earn that fairly’, ‘estate tax’ rather than ‘inherited wealth which is removed from general circulation’.

Do we want to limit ourselves to liberalism? Do we want to throw marxist IDEAS out with the bathwater of the failed soviet debacle? Are we still limited by cold-war methologies? Might we have a lot to learn from Latin American approaches to these issues, where a new wave of leftist governments have come about (although it is very hard to say the extent to which Chavez is truly democratic, its hard to get unbiased info on Chavez, though it seems like he does or has on occasion put HIS idea of social justice over others, and thus, not maintained a full commitment to POLITICAL freedom). But can we still learn from these ideas? Do we need a critique of liberalism on the progressive left? Could marxist forms of critique at least help us with this?

In the struggle for hearts and minds, in the effort to make ours a more just society, we need to change the sense that if everybody just goes out and votes, things will be better. Diebold, corporate lobbyists, deregulation, mass media empires - all of this have shown us otherwise. A first step towards change is to convince enough people that the system is broken, and needs extensive reforms, brought about my civil non-violent protests leading to change in popular opinion. Only when mass popular opinion changes can TRUE reform happen - and help, for a start get corporate cash out of politics (go publicly funded elections!). But, to do this, we’ve got to change some of the ways we conceptualize our political agency and organizing. The netroots is a great start. But might we want to start critiquing some of the ‘liberal’ ideas we inherited from the cold-war? Might we still have things to learn from the marxist critique of how capitalism warps democracy (which in fact, goes back before Marx to even Aristotle)? Are we still too influenced by cold-war ideologies of the link between unfettered capitalism and democracy? Do we need to change public perception on this, and start with outselves?

by from the puggle
Fri Dec 15, 2006 at 03:22:31 AM EDT
Link to Orig.

So, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about LarryinNYC’s diaries about the theory of the ‘Overton Window’, and why it makes a hell of a lot of sense for Kucinich to run. And I’ve gotta say, I can’t agree more - we need ‘fringe candidates’ (despite the fact that many of us agree with the principles of this fringe more than the mainstream dems), in order to move the debate to a point in which what was previously radical ideas seem part of mainstream discourse.

Then I read a diary by BigTentDemocrat that quoted a line by Richard Hofsteader that said the following:

Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of he political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle.

This is, I believe, the key for ‘08, and the key to making sure that the Neo-con philosophy really IS put in the wilderness where it belongs. More below.

So, how exactly DO we ‘define the middle’? Here’s my thoughts, but I want feedback, because now is the time for DailyKos to be the equivalent of those nasty right=wing think tanks = we need to refine the ideas that we can then pass to the candidates and activists on the ground. We’re the laboratory, and now’s the time.

So, here’s my thoughts.

1) PLAY THE ‘OVERTON WINDOW,’ OR, WE CAN WALK AND CHEW GUM AT THE SAME TIME - Ever wonder how the HELL the right got there to be two sides to the debate on how the world came about, evolution and ‘intelligent design’, and how you always need to have both sides of the story represented? Well, here’s how we do it, for the left. Let’s say we have someone on the left constantly screaming ‘universal health care’ instead of being shut down by the democratic establishment as ‘making us look bad’. Here’s how that HELPS - LarryinNYC’s diary has a great quote:

Now, back when Joe Overton drew up this notional list (which is meant to be illustrative, so don’t get hung up on its particular accuracy), the range of actual, reasonable possibilities as perceived by the general public in Overton’s state of Michigan were the items bolded below:

————————–
–No government involvement in education.
–All schools private with government regulation.
–Voucher system with public schools.
–Tuition tax credit with public schools.
–Homeschooling legal.

–Private schools restricted.
–Homeschooling illegal.

–Private schools illegal.
–Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
—————————–

The bolded items, representing the politically possible amongst all conceivable options, are the Overton window. The idea is to shift that window in the preferred direction. In Michigan today, the Overton window looks substantively different:

—————————
No government involvement in education.
All schools private with government regulation.

–Voucher system with public schools.
–Tuition tax credit with public schools.
–Homeschooling legal.
–Private schools restricted.

Homeschooling illegal.
Private schools illegal.
Children taken from parents and raised as janissaries.
—————————

Do you see how this works? Systematically, piece by piece, the GOP takes what had been considered impossibly radical positions and makes them worthy of consideration just by talking about them–and then makes what had been considered outside possibilities truly possible. Now, I happen to believe that legalization of homeschooling is a good thing (though there should be oversight)–others may disagree.

Basically, this theory says we do TWO THINGS AT ONCE. We have our attack dogs on the left hit the repubs hard, and espouse our ‘dream’ goals, while our frontrunners speak in very, very broad terms. By shifting the middle of the debate with our far lefties, we allow the CENTER TO SHIFT LEFT, reversing the very process whereby the left has done this.

2)SPEAK PRINCIPLES OVER POLICIES THE BIGGER YOU ARE, POLICIES OVER PRINCIPLES THE SMALLER YOU ARE: By the time you get to the presidential level, you speak in generalities. As Hofsteader argues, you don’t do the John Kerry ‘laundry list of things to do’, or triangulate in a way that waters you down - no, you REDEFINE THE MIDDLE. So, as the far lefties (like me) scream for our dream agenda in very specific detail, call the repubs on their bullshit, and our standard bearers articulate values and visions which redefine the BASIC WORDS that make a debate go.

3) PLAY WITH METAPHORS: So, BUSH re-defined FREEDOM, and rather brilliantly, I might ad. By saying, ‘they hate us for our freedom’, he substitutes ‘they hate us for the way we bully the world’ (a rational position), to that of a poor victim ‘they hate us for what’s best about us’ - with all the added flags, apple pies, mom, etc.

Obama is now working to redefine the METAPHORS in play. Kerry fought Bush on his turf by being ‘rational’ - no, we need more, better freedom, with my list of policies . . . Obama is saying, ‘we need HOPE for America’. In doing so, he labells what we have a LACK OF HOPE that american can be a better place. He puts the big ideals back in play. And then, those on the left, like me, can LINK hope with universal health care and raising the minimum wage, just like Bush linked the patriot act to ‘freedom’. It means we need a DIVISION OF LABOR IN OUR PR SYSTEM. That’s why we need a ticket like Obama/Clark - one person to inspire, the other to carry the big stick and attack when needed.

Of course, it seems to me the trick is to find the RIGHT metaphor to recast the debate. You don’t try to ‘I’m more security minded than you’ the Repubs. You shift to hope. They can’t play on that terrain, ya know? And from THERE, you link ‘hope’ to policies.

by from the puggle
Mon Dec 18, 2006 at 06:54:01 AM EDT
Link to Orig.

So, I recently came upon a diary called The Simple Life by waf8868. Basically, this diary is about a guy who was raised republican, got out of college wanting to ‘get rich’, and realized that the ‘american dream’ in this country means becoming a workaholic in a cubicle putting money away for a day that never seems to arrive, or buying more than is needed in a cycle of useless consumption, or as a way to no have to face issues in life that a more engaged life would require. And so, this guy did what is I think the most important thing a person can do, ever - he looked at his life, realized that the values that had been instilled in him were not necessarily the values he currently had, and decided to overhaul them. All social change, it hits me, starts with that move to step outside yourself and say, ‘do I buy the ways of life I’ve been sold?’

So, I want to pose this basic question. Can we have a real politics for the people today in the US? Or would that be, oh no, socialism? What does this dirty word have to do with the DKos community today?

THAT NAUGHTY WORD - SOCIALISM:
Socialism. A really, really, really bad word in this country. But not in Europe. And I think the European way of life, particularly in countries like Italy, Spain, France, and a few other places, makes a LOT of sense. Productivity is not the goal. Being the biggest, baddest, or king of the hill producer and economy is not the goal. Being a global superpower is not the goal. Its having a good life.

What a radical f@#$king idea.

But this isn’t the American way of life, and that’s why, when a bunch of cousins of my sister-in-law’s came to visit from Italy, they were amazed - why do you all work so much?! Why do you need such big houses, fancy cars, electronic gadgets? My friend and his wife both work themself to the ground on a house far too big for their needs, cars too nice to pay for, and a style of living that they barely get to enjoy. Who get’s to enjoy the fruits of their labor? Their stuff. When they’re not at home. I guess the knife, fork, and spoon have a party or something. I dunno.

Point is, I’m all with waf8868. When I hear newscommenters say, ‘America is losing its place as the top blah blah blah’, I always say to myself, but WHY must we be number one? But that is never questioned. Its just assumed.

A famous sociologist Max Weber wrote a classic in the field called ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Its actually a very detailed book for specialists, not one I’d recommend for pleasure reading, but the cliffs notes point is one that has resonated with sociologists ever since. Protestantism was the perfect mind set to fit growing capitalism, because it taught you to be austere but work really hard for tomorrow in heaven, rather than the catholic way of life, in which you get to spend and have ornament. America needs to shed the protestant ethic. We need to stop working to the bone to be number one.

So, here’s waf8868’s comments, I just stole the parts that hit me as the kicker of a heartfelt and overall wonderful diary:

. . . Most of us are stuck on a treadmill that we can’t get off and we cannot pursue those things to the degree that we would like that bring us Joy because we have to give up our lives in order to “make a living”. How many mothers or fathers are too busy to spend the type of quality time that they desire with their children? How many people out there would like to start a business doing something they are good at and would enjoy but cannot afford to quit and lose the health insurance? . . .

. . . given the unpredictable nature of life and the fact that we only have one shot here it would just seem rational to me that it would make more sense to structure our society so that we had tremendous social safety nets that would provide us with protection against a catastrophic health problem or other life events that sets us back. I think many in our culture have forgotten or do not realize that the purpose of an economy in a society is not to organize it so that a few can live like kings at the expense of the many but to organize economic activity so that the greatest amount of people can have the highest quality of life possible. If that means that our tax system is set up in such a way that Bill Gates can accumulate only a 10 billion dollar fortune instead of a 50 billion dollar fortune than so be it. Do you really think that he would have been any less motivated to work under a system like that when he can still get fabulously wealthy on a relative basis?

The wingnuts (and maybe some Kossacks as well) would call me a socialist since I am for a system that flattens out the curve a bit and reduces the gap between the rich elite and the rest of us. I say it just makes more sense to have a strong middle class with good disposable income and pooled risk systems set up such as Universal Healthcare and good pensions and labor laws and working hours that enable people to enjoy their one and only life while earning a livable wage for a reasonable amount of effort. Not work like dogs (or slaves) just so that they can barely keep up with the ever increasing costs of living.

Which gets me back to socialism. I don’t care WHAT you call it. But why don’t we make the economy work for us, rather than the other way around? How did we end up living in ‘The Matrix’, where the system sees us as living batteries, and little more? This ‘American Dream’ we were sold was marketed and hand crafted by the top 1% of the country to keep them rich, and the masses just happy enough to keep going. And in a consumer driven economy, that means you have a fancy home and lots of toys but no time to use them, or, you don’t and you wish you did. And if you want to change things, not a single politician would even dream to back that idea, cause you need to raise money to win, and that means corporations.

HOW AMERICA CAN AMERICA START BEING A DEMO-CRACY, RULED FOR-AND-BY ‘THE PEOPLE’?:

Here’s what I propose.

1) BREAK THE LINK BETWEEN MONEY AND POLITICS: We need a grassroots swell for 100% publicly funded elections in this country. In which corporations and private citizens can’t so much as buy a meal for a candidate or office holder while they are running for office. Rather, the government funds the needs of candidates, pays for debates and puts them on public access TV, etc. Lots of European countries have this. And make sure we pay our public officials enough, and forbid ANY money, goods, or services going to an elected official or candidate. Make it illegal for a senator’s mother to buy him breakfast, and make sure we pay senators enough that they don’t starve. That say, corruption will be much, MUCH harder. But nobody in Congress would ever go this far, cause of what they needed to do to get where they are. BUT THE GRASSROOTS CAN CALL FOR CHANGE.

2. PROVIDE A SAFETY NET: Once we do this, we set up a TRUE social safety net. I mean, isn’t this why we created government in the first place, to guard the PUBLIC good? The rich have always been able to buy armies to protect them. The repubs want us to go back to some odd version of the middle ages. No, we need universal health care, a constitutional ammendment giving the right to housing/shelter (thereby including heat and basic electricity, as well as a certian number of square feet of living space), HS education, college education (free of cost) if desired, health care, and basic nutrition to any and all who work or have lived in this country for over one year. That’s right, no such thing ‘illegal aliens’! If you work a job and contribute to this country for at least a year, and make a good effort to find further employment, you are contributing to the economy, so, its in our best interest to make sure you are healthy and happy (its also the ethically responsible thing to do). As one political organization has argued ‘those that live here are from here.’ Oh, and just to be clear, the government will pay financial aid for ALL education, so that there is no such things as those who can’t go to harvard because they can’t pay. If you want a college degree, and can show the grades to get in, you get to go. And if you want to go back to college, but don’t have the grades, the government will pay for tutoring. A more educated country is a more productive workforce, and ultimately, a stronger economy.

That said, nobody gets benefits from the government without doing stuff. So, my boyfriend was recently unemployed. In order to get the rather substantial benefits that NYC provides for this, including subsidizing his rent and utilities, food, etc., he had to go everyday and punch the clock at an office where he recieved training in finding jobs, was provided computers and phones to set up interviews, and had to document where he was when he wasn’t at ‘work’ (thus, if he went to the food stamp office, or a job interview). Needless to say, he was re-employed within a month.

Of course, this all makes economic sense in the long run. But in the short run, how do you pay for this?

3. TAX THE RICH, SILLY!!: Now, doesn’t this hurt our economy, get rid of thousands of jobs, and hurt the middle class? Nope. That’s what we’ve been sold. Or rather, sure it hurts the economy, in a sense. We are a consumer driven economy, and have been ever since the shift from a production to consumption base in the years around WWII. Basically, this means that so long as people BUY stuff, the economy produces jobs. The thing is, though, it doesn’t matter WHO buys things, the super-rich, or the middle class - so long as somebody buys stuff, the economy keeps creating jobs. So, the way you pay for the social safety net is to simply create a nice, simple tax. Anybody individual making more than $100,000, or any family making above $200,000, gives 75 percent of all further earnings to the ’safety net’ fund. Oh, and limit the amount of money/assets that anybody can hand down to any individual to $100,000, so wealth isn’t something you’re born with.

4. HOW CORPORATIONS CAN SAVE US:
Now, this doesn’t say much about corporations. Well, you just need to regulate the hell out of them. Capitalism is beast, so you need to keep it on a short leash if its to work for you. So, keep capital gains taxes about where they are now. But with caps on individual income, INCLUDING INCOME FROM STOCK DIVIDENDS, well, then surplus cash earned by corporations will have to be funelled back into the business themselves, thus fueling the economy. Of course, you need to have really strict laws to make sure they don’t funnel the money offshore. If your company makes money here, that money stays here. If Toyota sets up a company here, at least half the profits made need to be re-invested here, either in infrastructure, worker benefits, etc.

5. HOW CONSUMPTION DRIVES THE ECONOMY:
Will this hurt the economy? In a sense. The superrich will find it hard to not become upper-middle class. Foreign investors will run away a bit, but they’ll come back once they realize that the US is the center of the global information, service, and consumption economy. Without Americans to buy products, very little works elsewhere in the world. Most economists agree, its not production that fuels the economy anymore - if it was, then all you’d have to do is make lots of products, and people will grab them. That used to be the case, before EVERYBODY had a new gizmo. But how do you make sure the economy keeps growing, once you’ve made a lot of gizmos? You convince people their old gizmo sucks, is outdated, or out of style, so they need to buy a new one. This keeps factories going, which keeps people working, which allows them to spend. The economy is a self-perpetuating cycle - so long as people buy, in today’s economy, all is good. Buying creates wealth by stimulating production. Ask almost any economist today, and they’ll tell you about this ‘elasticity of demand’ thing, and how it powers the economy.

6. DOES MARKET SOCIALISM STIFLE INNOVATION?: But would this plan stifle innovation? This would be a real problem, because without innovation, consumers could power the economy, but those who SELL to them wouldn’t necessarily be from this country. Of course, allowing some other countries to get in on the lucrative US market might actually be one step towards a fairer world. But let’s pretend for a moment we’re only concerned about the US, and want to keep productive power here. That means we need to not only buy to create new demands, but innovate enough so that we produce products to fill that demand (and in the process, create the products the rest of the world will want, because demand breeds even more demand!). All of which means that we need to keep innovating to keep the cycle going.

Innovation takes many forms - a new, hip style, or a new technology. Either or both are created by one thing, and one thing alone - COMPETITION. But that’s where socialism fails, and capitalism shines, right? Well, in an old style, soviet-era socialism, there was no competition, it was all top-down. But good companies ALWAYS allow for competition WITHIN them.

Apple, one of the most innovative companies, allows spin-off groups to work on secret projects, and gives them a lot of freedom to do so (one result was the Macintosh!), and Toyota, one of the most sucessfull companies, does the same. Heck, GM became the biggest car company in the world because in the 1950’s and 60’s, it had its own internal brands, like Buick and Oldsmobile, compete with each other! But since they weren’t competing for money, since money went to the general GM coffers, and GM then allocated the money to the most sucessfull groups to pursue their innovative designs, well, what were they competing for? Nobody took home the extra cash that GM central office dispensed, no, that went to the division to directly fund innovation (not gold toilet seats, like it does in capitalist models of innovation creation).

Take university professors. No-one is in that field for the money, but they compete like crazy, sometimes in even a cut-throat manner. Rarely do profs pull in big bucks, even in science - most often, the big grants they get go to their LAB, not their own pockets. No, what everyone competes for isn’t really money, rather, its STATUS.

Now, in capitalist societies, that’s what everyone does ANYWAY. I mean, what is a Luis Vuitton bag, but status condensed into a tiny leather package? Surely its not a superior bag, its just concentrated status. Capitalism isn’t about money, its about power. The desire for status, for prestige, will still operate WITHIN the innovation machine of a truly MARKET SOCIALISM, in which innovation comes from the ground up, the innovators get more prestige and control over industry, but STATUS keeps the system going WITHOUT the intermediate step of going through the money circuit. And that way, people still get what they want, namely, prestige, but the surplus cash goes back into the production process. In this sense, market socialism, properly implemented, is potentially more innovative, and more efficient, than pure capitalism.

Don’t believe me? Ask GM and Toyota. At points in which these companies were working at their peaks, they give us some of the best models of what a market socialist government would look like. Only, rather than serving shareholders, imagine a Toyota for the people.

7. NATIONAL SERVICE: I might also be for something like a ‘national service requirement.’ Lots of countries have this, its not just some crazy republican idea to make people serve in the military. Here’s what I think. The year after HS but before college/work or whatever, people spend one year doing national service. While this COULD be done by entering the military, most people will opt for helping in a different way. The government will pay a subsistence wage during that year, say, something like $15,000, varied according to cost of living where you live, household situation, etc. And from there, you’d do a job that the government needs done, from rebuilding New Orleans to doing daycare or filing in some government office. You want to talk about raising productivity? What if each year the safety net had 500,000 employees at reduced rate, and in the process, helped make America a better place, WHILE making sure that each person in the program gets at least 2 months of job training that they can then take on the market with them?

8. THE RESULTS?: Aristotle argued in ‘The Politics,’ a text used by the framers of the constitution, that without a strong middle class, democracy fails. Too many rich people and the government becomes beholden to it, and too many poor and revolution is at the doorstep. Right now, our system is rigged. It is designed to produce tons of lower-middle class workers who just work themselves on the treadmill, and buy way too much for time they don’t ever have to spend with it.

I’ve lived for the last 9 years doing my PhD on an average of about 22,000 a year, and in New York City. Now, I won’t say it hasn’t been hard making ends meet, but have I been unhappy? Only when I couldn’t pay basic bills. I have a dog, cable, a working computer, and my one vice - books. See, I’m finishing my phd. If the government had made the safety net stronger, I’d not have to have weaned off some key medication when the union at my university vanished due to Bush’s NLRB. Point is, though, that not having that much money makes you find ways to be happy that don’t require THAT much cash. Like reading. Or writing. Or going back to school. Or doing something other than buying stuff.

The thing is, I LOVE what I do for a living. I get to teach college students, and I feel like I really make a difference. I don’t make that much cash, but I love my job - and my dad hated his, and was gutted by it, it sucked his soul dry for 30 years. I decided I never wanted to do that to myself. While this career choice has been a little difficult at time, its ONLY because of the lack of social safety net in our society, things like having to have give up healthcare for like 2 years. But if you love what you do for a living, and feel like you’re doing something bigger than yourself, you don’t really need all that much in the way of material possessions to be happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I like having my ipod too, and I’ve got a nifty apple computer I really like, and use to the bone. And I need my my puppy, and lots of books at my disposal. But not really tons of fancy clothes or designer stuff or whatever. Which isn’t to say I’m totally immune to the lure of capitalism. But at least when you know its a lure you can work to keep it on a leash, allow yourself some guilty pleasures, but at least realize they’re just that. But its also WHAT you’re guilty pleasures are. With books, you have to actually read some of them eventually to keep buying them. Let’s hope that when I start making some more money, I don’t get sucked in. But I’d much rather use it to, say, come to yearly Kos, or travel and expand my sense of the world, than have a widescreen TV. Let’s just hope I stay that way. The road is long, ya know? Easy to feel self-righteous here, but, you know, anybody who makes over 100,000 and doesn’t have a family to support, well, I just wonder. What do you need all that cash for? And why do your things seem to be having more fun than you are, and working a lot less at that?

Point is, while I might fall off the wagon at some point, my GOAL is to lead a life of generally reduced consumption of fancy consumer goods. And if major chunks of my income start going to things other than making a good life for my boyfriend, family, kids, and puppy, well, then I hope I have a similar revelation to waf8688 and get myself back on track. But its gonna be an uphill struggle, so, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

I think if you structure the economy differently, the lure of ‘conspicuous consumption’ will descrease, and prestige and competition will shift to accomplishments rather than Gucci, and people will shift more of their self esteem to things other than just what they can buy. Or start doing more things like gardening again. I know that might sound silly, but my friend grew up in Eastern Europe, and when he came here to study, he said that under communism a LOT was fucked up, but, people’s careers didn’t define them. A person went to work, and then came home, and their REAL vocation was the wine they made from the vines in their garden, rather than ‘I’m an accountant’. There’s I think a lot to learn from this.

6. OK, BUT THIS SOUNDS LIKE ITS GOT A LOT OF COMPETITION AND INNOVATION - IS IT STILL SOCIALISM?!?: Call it what you will. I think its a form of market socialism, that is, a form of economy which takes the best of the market, but without the horrible side effects of an unfettered behemoth of corporate capital. And by not compromising democracy, but safeguarding it with publically funded elections, and the elimination of ALL contributions to those who hold public office, you finally get elected officials who vote their conscience, and so, you SAFEGUARD democracy, and maybe have REAL democracy in this country for the first time, ever. To me, call that what you will. But it sounds to me like more freedom than the ‘free-est’ country on earth has ever had. Of course, its a whole different ethic in regard to what life is all about. But all it takes is what waf8868 did. Just step out of the Matrix for a bit, and decide you don’t want to do it like this anymore.

One person can step out, sure, like waf8868, and lead a much happier life. But when the entire SOCIETY steps out of the circle, well, that’s when real change can happen.

But do we need to call it socialism? Heck no. Words are just that. So, here’s what I want to call it - ‘the politics of the people’. You know, as in ‘we the people’. Rather than politics for the corporations, or politics for the few. That sort of thing. Call it what you like. But its government for the people, not the Forbes 500.

8. BUT IT CAN NEVER HAPPEN HERE: Oh no? That’s what they said with the American Revolution. If enough people start protesting, staging civil disobedience, not going to work the next day, just wait and see how fast change starts. But you need enough people. You need the grassroots, who have nothing to lose but this current crappy system. Why HAVEN’T we done this sooner? Because the powers that be spend a lot of money on making sure that only those who agree enough with them can get elected, on our airwaves, in print, etc. How the hell do so many of us smoke? We do things against our interests all the time, because those in power convince us to give them our very real power. Democracy is what happens when you take that power back, not by dollars, but by numbers.

MARKET SOCIALISM - A POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE . . .
If every single person who thinks the Bush regime has been a fiasco went to the center of their town with a ‘bush must go’ sign, and decided to not go to work until something happened, if everyone who voted for Kerry simply did just this, I’d give him 72 hours before the executives at Halliburton and the Republican leadership sat him down and told him he’d have to go. If we hit them where it hurts - the pocketbook, change can happen. When nobody shows us to make McDonald’s hamburgers one day, and all those workers are in the public square asking for the removal of the president, big business will do whatever is necessary to get those people back to work. That is how change starts. All you’ve gotta do is convince enough people that they have the power to make it happen, and that change is needed in the first place. Like waking up from the Matrix . . .

To me, this doesn’t sound all that radical, it just sounds like common sense. A government for the PEOPLE. What a strange concept??! For the people rather than the corporations? Could we do that? Why haven’t we done it long ago? Oh, because they convinced us it couldn’t be done! Riiiiiiight. Like stepping out of the Matrix . . .

by from the puggle
Sat Dec 30, 2006 at 01:48:28 PM EDT
Link to Orig.

This is a resonse to the hanging of Sadam Hussein.

Certain images sear themselves into the brain, and seep into the collective consciousness. Nixon’s victory signs as he walked into the helicopter, no longer president. The execution at point blank range of a young Vietnamese soldier. The young girl running naked in the street in Vietnam (who, if my memory is right, had been badly burned). The image of a young girl screaming in horror with her hand on a student who’d fallen to the ground at Kent state. Lyndie England smiling and pointing in the Abu Graib photos. The face of the dead and battered Zarqawi and Hussein brothers, pushed out there for the world to see. These images don’t go away.

Today, I turned on my computer to read the news, and I see, assaulting me, the image of Saddam Hussein. I couldn’t escape it, it was on the front page of the Times, on the Huffington post. I hear it is on video loop at Fox.

One of my relatives, a firm Bush supporter, said to me on the phone this morning - ‘did you see it? its like thug justice.’ There was disbelief in his voice.

Mr. Bush, you have your porn.

Saddam Hussein just stares into the distance. I have not seen the video as I write this, and have mixed feelings on whether of not I will choose to, if it is not foisted on me by the media as this image was. To see it for the trauma, to understand the trauma. But if I see it or not, I will know it is obscene. It is terror porn.

We have seen a lot of this. These images are evidence. They are often put forward to show evidence that these figures killed by the United States will not come back. And yet, their images don’t stop coming back. They will stay with us.

As I watched him staring into the distance, about to ‘meet his maker,’as some say, I couldn’t help to think, what if I were in his shoes? What would I think, knowing that in a moment I wouldn’t think any more? We all deserve to die for some reason or another. And also, none of us do. But some are much, much more guilty than others. But who are we to play god like this?

Who is the president to execute his enemies, like in Roman times, when you paraded your enemy in chains for the city to see? Today it is on video. But this trial was not Nuremberg. There was no international consensus. This was thug justice, and the world knows it. And so do we.

As you look at the two men on either side of him, they wear no uniform, and black masks. One is in what seems to be a trenchcoat or cloth jacket, the other wears a worn-out leather jacket. This is like when Mussolini was hung by his feet. If these men had been wearing anything but these random clothes, there would at least be a sense of dignity. But no, the leather on the jacket isn’t even new or clean. The men were not in suits, were not in any sort of ceremonial or ritual or official garb to show they represent a principle rather than themselves. And this is because they do not. They represent pure force. That is all.

The one phrase I could not get out of my head is that which ends Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’. After a senseless mock-trial, during which he can find out neither what he is charged with or who accuses him, two men accost Josef K to execute him. They take him to the outskirts of town, and when he won’t do it for them, they kill him with a knife. And K thinks to himself, ‘like a dog’.

One thug has killed another. Would I feel better if it were Mr. Bush standing there, with an oversize knot in that noose, just as everything in this war has been too big, ’shock and awe’? The animal in me would feel a cheap thrill, the better parts of me disgust at the animal parts. We are perhaps condemmed to have both, but at least some of us try to keep the two parts separate.

As I look at Mr. Hussein’s face, I don’t see evil. His evil is long gone. No, I see evil in his face in a video clip I saw the other day, when he is smiling, patting a child on the head, I believe an American who he has taken hostage as ‘collateral’ in case he is invaded for his actions in Kuwait. There is video footage, which has been colorized, of Hitler smiling and enjoying himself in his mountain home. To me, it is the Hitler who was a vegetarian, the one who liked to give cake to children, who married Eva Braun - that’s the Hitler who is evil.

Bush was on tv the other day, almost crying, trying to hold it back, as he came out of one of his few trips to Walter Reade visitin the wounded. Did he realized he caused this? Those tears, those genuine tears, are maybe more evil than anything I’ve seen recently. Who are you to cry for them? You do not deserve it. Those tears are perhaps as evil as the smile on the face of Saddam who pats the clearly terrified child sitting on his knee on the head. And with a smile.

Are we as bad as them when we hate these people? Or is the fact that we hate, but do not act on our hate like they do, the difference? What if we had the power to? As a famous philosopher said, ‘everybody wants to be a fascist.’ We all have the beast within. Is the only difference between us and them that we are aware of that, and work to keep it in check? But can we say we would if we had their power? Let us only pray we are not as bad as they, because we can’t know until we have a life in our hands. Let us pray, at least, that we are not as they are.

The image of Mr. Hussein provided us by the Bush administration is obscene. It is traumatic. It is a representation of justice destroyed. Whatever Mr. Hussein may have deserved, this was a mistrial, a travesty.

Will Mr. Bush stand trial for his crimes? Will we be forced to bear with the tragedy of the mistrial of justice which will be a lack of prosectution of Mr. Bush? We know that he murdered Mr. Hussein. He may as well have used his own hands. He is not brave enough to take that responsibility.

On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times was a photo of a medic who was shot in the face a few days ago. He was profiled a week previous in the Times. His was in one piece then, and he was interviewed extensively, grieving over his former roomate from training, who had gotten hit in the head, who was in critical condition, but the bullet had entered his brain, I believe. The medic was 22, his friend was 19. These are children you are killing, Mr. Bush. Have they had a chance to live yet? What have you done?

And yet the cable news play President Ford and James Brown. Two other deaths. But they blanket the news. This is also obscene.

Riverbend’s last diary listed an account of her cousin who was killed for no reason, as he was about to marry the woman he’d been with for the last six years. Just like the young man in queens was killed on the night before his wedding by fifty one bullets fired by new york city cops. What have we become. And how can we make this stop?

The fact that we do not see the deaths, the death of americans, even less the massive number of deaths or Iraqis, so often civilians, this is also obscene. We see instead the media-porn of the paris hiltons and kevin federlines. Shame. Shame on all of us. But can you imagine not knowing each time you go out for groceries if you’ll come back? Or worse, if your mother, or brother, or partner would? To live with that terror. I know that I can’t concieve of it, but I remain damn helpless to know what to do about it. What has our country done.

Have we done enough? Everyday I wake up wondering why there haven’t been mass uprisings in the streets years ago to stop Mr.Bush. I know if I go into the streets today, no one will listen. These things take time. They should not. Evil does not wait for elections to stop its work. If we had all said with one voice ‘no’ years ago, this could’ve never happened. And many of us tried, though none of us will ever know if there might not have been a way to do more. But it may not have mattered if we gave up our lives to camp on Mr.Bush’s lawn like Cindy Sheehan did. Unless everyone was there with her, it wouldn’t be enough. No matter how much we abhorr all this, we cannot make it stop by ourselves.

All I know right now is that Mr.Bush has his porn. Let us pray there be less of this terror porn. Let us hope that our national nightmare turned international nightmare will soon come to an end. I’m not sure how. I can only hope that January fifth Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can start, start, the process. But will we take anywhere near the steps needed to start the processes of healing for what can never be made right?
Will we never learn? Will we have another Vietnam in another thirty years? When will our country stop being so fucked up that every few years it has somebody do its dirty work for it, and then wonders how those bad apples got elected in the first place? Is this damned to happen again? Will we ever learn? I even feel odd writing this. But I guess somebody has to say things. I know I feel better when someone else articulates what I feel needs to be said. But it is odd to say it, because you know you don’t deserve to. All you know is that it needs to stop, whatever you or anyone else says, whatever blogs come and go, whatever bullshit happens.

Let us pray that at least the beginning of the end of all this current evil has begun. Let us pray that that is at least the case.

May god help us fix this mess.

by from the puggle
Sat Jan 13, 2007 at 05:13:59 PM EDT
Link to Orig.

Why do we need to raise the minimum wage? Why do we need universal healthcare? Why do we need to stop supporting really bad dictators around the world that keep the oil flowing? Why do we need to get off our addiction to oil, but start investing in creating sustainable jobs in the Arab world? Why do we need to stop producing an army which manages to have almost no children of the wealthy and privileged, and so can be sent off to war by those in power without a second thought? Why do we need to SEVER the link between big money and the government it owns?

Because otherwise, THIS is where the money goes . . . next generation space-age fighter planes like the F-22. Really. More below . . .

According to Frida Berrigan, reporting at Tomsdispatch.com and cross-posted here at Alternet.com, Lockheed and its friends in the war-profiteering sector are hard at work developing the next generation of high-tech weapons.

Berrigan details two reasons why this is just so fucked up. The first is that these projects ACTIVELY KILL U.S. soldiers currently in the field:

Ask soldiers in Iraq what they need most and answers may include: well-armored Humvees (many soldiers are jerry-rigging their own homemade Humvee armor); more body armor (an unofficial 2004 Army study found that one in four casualties in Iraq was the result of inadequate protective gear), or even silly string (Marcelle Shriver found out that her son was squirting the goo into a room as he and his squad searched buildings to detect trip wires around bombs). The same Army that can’t provide such basics of modern war is now promising the Future Combat Systems network (FCS), a “family of systems” that will enable soldiers to “perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels.

So, for each soldier who died for the lack of body armor (which isn’t even to MENTION the fact that they shouldn’t be there in the first place, or all the Iraqi’s who died in the process . . .), they died because just ONE of these projects wasn’t taken off the table and converted to body armor, humvee armor, or in horrendous irony, basics which troops substitute for with things like silly string, that their worried parents send them from home.

How much money are we talking about? Well, the new F-22 fighter supposedly cost the government a total of 65 billion to develop and produce, at a cost of 130 million for each plane (without the R&D costs factored in). How about just ONE of those billion for armor for these poor kids who signed up due to glamorously produced TV spots, and the promises of paying for college? How many of those kids were killed at ages like 19?

But no, intead, its all about the bottom line, making the stock price go up. You want to see the face of evil? Its the mid-level beaurocrat looking for ways to ‘market’ their product at Lockheed to the government, or who wants to simply help ‘maximize returns’ to produce higher profits for the shareholders. And just in cause you didn’t already think it wasn’t about PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE to FUEL THE MARKET FOR MORE WEAPONS (is there a better definition of ‘profiteering’?), check this out:

The plane was originally conceived to counter Soviet fighter planes, which haven’t menaced the U.S. for more than 15 years. The plane itself is technologically awe-inspiring, reportedly having a twice-the-speed-of-sound cruising speed of Mach 2. (The Pentagon jealously guards its maximum speed as top secret.)

In 2007, the only reason the military might need such a plane is to outfight its predecessor, the F-16, which Lockheed Martin has sold to numerous countries that benefited from the corporation’s vociferous lobbying for new markets and our government’s lax enforcement of arms-export controls.

In this classic case of boomeranging weaponry, Lockheed Martin has triumphed three times: First, General Dynamics sold F-16 fighters to the Air Force beginning in 1976; second, Lockheed (which bought General Dynamics) sold the planes to Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and other nations from the 1980s to the present moment; and third, Lockheed Martin (having merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 and adjusted its name accordingly) now gets to produce an even higher tech plane for a U.S. Air Force that fears it might be outclassed by foreign military hardware that once was our own. The Bethesda-based company ended 2001 with a stock price of $46.67 a share — and began 2007 at a celebratory $92.07.

I am angry. I am fuckin pissed. They created weapons, which were made obsolete by selling more of them to other countries, fueling the need for more weapons. Each soldier killed in Iraq, who will never get to go to that college, because they didn’t get body armor (according to Berrigan, that’s about “one in four” of the fatalities), their blood has been turned into numbers. Higher stock prices, a higher blip in the bank accounts, numbers which then can be turned into things like campaign contributions, or yachts, or private schools so your kids don’t have to go to school with everybody else, or private doctors so that you don’t need public health insurance, or private EVERYTHING so you can live in your gated community.

But its not just those soldiers who have been turned into numbers. Its the lives of the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world who have seen none of the oil profits fed into sustainable industry, public education, or development. Rather, a few powerful families we keep in power (house of Fahd, perhaps?), who keep the surpluses going directly to them, their F-16’s, and those who make them. No wonder everybody ‘there’ is angry at ‘us.’

CONNECTING THE DOTS - CAPITALISM AND TERROR:
Because they GET it. They connect the dots. But the whole point of capitalism is you get the chance to not HAVE to connect the dots if you’re far enough within the system. That house bought with blood money is just a house bought with money earned hard by 40 hours a week in a cubicle.

And who built that house? Well, migrant laborers from Mexico who were denied healtcare! Who made your clothes but the people slaving in factories owned by American companies, but moved overseas so they could avoid costly things like worker safety laws, and who actively lobby governments to keep safety laws off the books?

This is called the DRAINAGE OF SURPLUS. There’s more than enough wealth in this world to go around. But you need to create demand for things people don’t actually need, in order to drive the market, and these products need to be high-tech enough so that only those already in the field can compete. And then you get rid of things like the capital-gains tax or the estate tax, just to make sure the money STAYS in the same hands, enough to pass laws to make sure that even more of the surplus doesn’t get spread around, but concentrated in the pockets of those who already have it. So you buy politicians, and hacks like our well-paid lackey, that accountant at Lockheed. But the person working for minimum wage at McDonalds puts in their 40 hours too, and yet, who goes home with the six figure salary at Lockheed, who produced a product that the world didn’t need, and in fact actively worked to CREATE the need for, and then needs to destroy in useless wars so the government can buy more, and then needs to buy politicians to keep the cycle going?

Just by living in this country, by buying clothes made in China, by going to American universities (where have they invested their money - the university that paid my salary for years had philanthopic benefactors who were war profiteers), by buying products or working for seemingly harmless companies who then invest in companies like Lockheed - we are sucked into this system. Just by breathing in this country we become part of it. But we can take back the keys of government, and break the link between money and politics, start divesting our companies from war profiteers, fight for international labor fairness laws.

Cause if we put the same damn money we put into fighter planes into building schools, hospitals, universities, and sustainable industry in the developing world, we’d find that there’d be a HELL of a lot less wars and terrorism. As Hamas has learned well in Palestine and Lebanon, you don’t gain loyalty with guns. You gain loyalty by the best PR money can buy - building schools and hospitals. We could win these wars, cheaper, by investing in those we today consider our enemies. But right now it could never happen. Because it’d be bad for business, in particular, the defense business, and with the money that business brings, you can buy politicians. We need to break that link.

When that accountant gets burned out staring at the walls of that cubicle, does he/she then take a vacation? In some impoverished island ‘paradise’ where the only industries are tourism and some really exploitative factories? Maybe this accoutant should take their holiday in Dubai, in a hotel built by migrant laborers from Pakistan. Who hate him. As they should.

WHY DO WE NEED TO TAKE THE KEYS OF GOVERNMENT AWAY FROM BUSINESS?
Because otherwise this cycle keeps going.

Fight for fully publically funded elections, and strict laws to keep our lawmakers separate from any influence from corporate cash. There’s more at stake here than it seems.