Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

The GOP's Death Wish

Why Republicans Can't Stop Pissing Off  Hispanics, Women, and Young People

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people.

It’s almost as if the GOP can’t help itself.

Start with Hispanic voters, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they comprise an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney by more than two to one, according to a recent Pew poll.

The movement of Hispanics into the Democratic camp has been going on for decades. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Replicating California Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s disastrous support almost twenty years ago for Proposition 187 – which would have screened out undocumented immigrants from public schools, health care, and other social services, and required law-enforcement officials to report any “suspected” illegals. (Wilson, you may remember, lost that year’s election, and California’s Republican Party has never recovered.)

The Arizona law now before the Supreme Court – sponsored by Republicans in the state and copied by Republican legislators and governors in several others – would authorize police to stop anyone looking Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. It’s nativism disguised as law enforcement.
Romney is trying to distance himself from that law, but it’s not working. That may be because he dubbed it a “model law” during February’s Republican primary debate in Arizona, and because its author (former state senator Russell Pearce, who was ousted in a special election last November largely by angry Hispanic voters) says he’s working closely with Romney advisers.

Hispanics are also reacting to Romney’s attack just a few months ago on GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And to Romney’s advocacy of what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.

As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may have the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.

Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). The political gender gap is huge. According to recent polls, women prefer Obama to Romney by over 20 percent.

So what is the GOP doing to woo women back? Attacking them. Last February, House Republicans voted to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. Last May, they unanimously passed the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” banning the District of Columbia from funding abortions for low-income women. (The original version removed all exceptions – rape, incest, and endangerment to a mother’s life – except “forcible” rape.)

Earlier this year Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests (Pennsylvania Republicans even wanted proof such had viewed the images).

Republican legislators in Georgia and Arizona passed bills banning most abortions after twenty weeks of pregnancy. The Georgia bill would also require that any abortion after 20 weeks be done in a way to bring the fetus out alive. Republican legislators in Texas have voted to eliminate funding for any women’s healthcare clinic with an affiliation to an abortion provider – even if the affiliation is merely a shared name, employee, or board member.

All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.

But even this doesn’t seem enough for the GOP. Republicans in Wisconsin just repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.

Or, finally, consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back? Attack them, of course.
Republican Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – allows rates on student loans to double on July 1 – from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. That will add an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads, which already exceed credit-card debt.

House Republicans say America can’t afford the $6 billion a year it would require to keep student loan rates down to where they are now. But that same Republican plan gives wealthy Americans trillions of dollars in tax cuts over the next decade. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans have come up with just enough money to keep the loan program going for another year – safely past Election Day – by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)

Here again, Romney is trying to tiptoe away from the GOP position. He now says he supports keeping student loans where they were. Yet only a few months ago he argued that subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

How can a political party be so dumb as to piss off Hispanics, women, and young people? Because the core of its base is middle-aged white men – and it doesn’t seem to know how to satisfy its base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, and middle-aged.

 Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.  He writes a blog at www.robertreich.org.  His most recent book is Beyond Outrage.

Jamming Too Slow On Student Loans

"I'm President Barack Obama, and I too want to slow jam the news."

You've probably seen this already -- President Obama's appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon during which they "slow jam the news" on the need for Congress to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (Congress must do so by July 1, or rates will go up from 3.4 to 6.8%):



At this point Republicans are predictably against extending the current rates, and their presidential candidate, Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, used to be with them.  Remember when he said students shouldn't count on the government's help:  “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that . . .  And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

But Romney is beginning to understand how potent an issue this is, and this week conceded that he would support an extension of the current interest rates on Stafford-loans, although as Amy Davidson points out, "there was no musical component to the announcement."

His fellow Republicans in Congress obscure their opposition to having the government assist students with their debt by claiming they don't object to extending the lower interest rates (although the Ryan Budget that passed the House doesn't do so) but are concerned with how to pay for it.  As Greg Sargent points out they are floating various ways to pay for the extension that seem likely to get shot down by the Democrats.

And while Democrats are merely trying to maintain the status quo, it is worth making the important point, as Robert Borosage does, that they should be building the groundwork for more progressive reforms to help students, such as 0% loans and/or free tuition at public colleges.

The Dismantling Of California's Schools

By Rose Aguilar, cross-posted from Al Jazeera

I recently invited University of California-Davis sophomore Sarena Grossjan-Navarro to join my radio show - focusing on the Occupy Education actions taking place across the country, and the recent plan to descend on Sacramento to Occupy the Capitol, but she wasn't available. She's taking a heavy load this term, hoping to incur as little debt as possible. She was almost forced to drop out last term because the financial aid she receives is not enough to cover the basics. She's currently sleeping on friends' couches because she can't afford housing.

Grossjan-Navarro was one of the UC-Davis students who got pepper-sprayed by a police officer wearing riot gear during a peaceful protest on November 18, 2011. The students were speaking out against tuition hikes and the brutal treatment of Occupy demonstrators at UC-Berkeley, who were beaten and billy-clubbed a week earlier.

You've might have seen the video, which went viral and received international outrage. Nineteen UC-Davis students and alumni recently sued the University for constitutional violations over the incident, which was not only traumatising, but caused them burning sensations for days.

To say that students and faculty are angry and fed up is putting it lightly. Over the past year, we've seen students across the United States protest, hold walk-outs and teach-ins, and even shut down freeways and bridges. The Occupy movement has energised and yes, even radicalised, a new generation of students who haven't been politically active until now.

They're barely making ends meet. They're going to the school food pantry because they can't afford enough food. They're either racking up debt or are on the verge of dropping out because of ongoing tuition hikes. They deserve better.

We're Number 27!

By Jim Hightower, cross-posted from OtherWords

Eric Drooker

"USA: We're No. 1!"

Oh, wait — Iceland is No. 1. But we did beat out Poland and Slovakia, right? Uh...no. But go on down the rankings and there we are! No. 27, fifth from the bottom. So our new national chant is, "USA: At Least We're Not Last!"

A foundation in Germany has analyzed the social justice records of all 31 members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), ranking each nation in such categories as health care, income inequality, pre-school education, and child poverty. The overall performance by the United States — which boasts of being an egalitarian society — outranks only Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. Actually, three of those countries performed better than ours in the education of pre-schoolers, and Greece did better than the United States on the prevention of poverty.

Our bottom-of-the-heap ranking in social justice confirms the economic and political inequality that the Occupy movement is protesting. It also helps explain why this grassroots uprising in America has spread so rapidly to more than 600 communities and has generated such broad public support. After all, our nation is fabulously rich, ranking well ahead of nearly every other OECD member in national wealth, so there's no excuse for us sitting at the bottom of the list in education, health care, poverty, and other measures of a democratic and egalitarian society.

Bluntly put, We the People have let today's elites abandon America's founding principles of fairness, justice, and equal opportunity for all.

These privileged few have purchased our government, stolen the wealth and economic future of working families, and reduced America to a plastic imitation of the country we thought we had. The Occupy rebellion is long overdue and on target.

Join it.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.

"Is Our Child Learning?" Bush Remains Clueless As He Praises 10 Years Of No Child Left Behind

By Laura Clawson, cross-posted from Daily Kos

Former President George W. Bush has emerged to defend one of his signature "accomplishments": No Child Left Behind. In an interview with Time's Andrew Rotherham, Bush heaps on the superlatives that no one else is applying to NCLB. He's "extremely proud." It's "one of the really positive things our Administration accomplished" and "it's time to celebrate excellence" on the law's 10th anniversary. With that, he has some words of advice for President Obama:

The President is going to have to be very firm in resisting the temptation to take the easy path. The President has to take the lead and say, Wait a minute, No Child Left Behind has worked. Let’s not weaken it.

Are you fucking kidding me? Even by Bush standards, the claim that No Child Left Behind has worked is shocking. Bush specifically cites "a noticeable change in achievement, particularly among minority groups," but between 1992 (10 years before passage of NCLB) and 2007 (five years after), the black-white achievement gap on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, called "the nation's report card," narrowed in only 15 states for fourth grade math and just four states for eighth grade math. In reading, the fourth grade gap narrowed in just three states, and the eighth grade gap narrowed in none. Data on the Hispanic-white achievement gap is less complete, but in most states for which there is data, the gap remains essentially unchanged.

It's not just the racial gaps that are at issue, either. As Diane Ravitch, an education expert who at this point basically lives her life doing penance for having supported NCLB at the time it was passed, wrote in 2010, rounded education has in many schools been abandoned for test preparation focusing on specific tests in narrow subject areas (generally just math and reading, as if those are the only components of an education).
Yet:

Despite the time and money invested in testing, scores on NAEP have increased slowly or not at all. In mathematics the rate of improvement was greater before NCLB was passed. In reading there have been gains in fourth grade, but the national scores for eighth graders were essentially the same in 2009 as they were in 1998.

The sad fact is that President Obama's education funding policy, Race to the Top, is no better than No Child Left Behind. It, too, is founded on an obsession with forms of testing and measurement that have not been proven effective. It has accelerated the growth of often profit-driven charter schools. In short, it keeps many of the worst features of NCLB while adding in some equally bad ones.

But if there's someone Obama should not listen to on education, it's the president who set us down this disastrous path to begin with. So, President Obama: You're going to have to be very firm in resisting the temptation to take the easy path. You have to take the lead and say, Wait a minute, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have not worked. Let’s scrap them and start over.

On Service Learning In Hyderabad

My lovely and brilliant cousin, Samantha, is, among many other things, a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.  For the past six months, she has been in Hyderabad, India, through a fellowship for The Modern Story, "a not-for-profit organization that bridges the technological and narrative divide by introducing digital skills and storytelling practices to youth and educators around the world."  In this post, she talks about the inspiring and empowering work she has done with her students in Hyderabad.

By Samantha Love, cross-posted from The Modern Story

Through our various experiences in the classroom, we all develop a unique pedagogy as educators. I think this is one of the most fascinating parts of the job – the fact that no two people will have an identical approach, that everyone must find their teaching “style” and align it with systems and strategies that enable you to be as effective as possible. I still consider myself a novice, my pedagogical philosophy is still developing as I imagine it will continue to shift and evolve throughout my career, but one thing I do know from my experience as both a teacher and student, is the tremendous impact of service learning.

What could be more empowering and instructional than designing a project to ameliorate the social and environmental problems we learn about in school? What is a more pertinent example of the purpose of education to create an informed and active citizenry which will act on their knowledge in the best interest of the community? The applications for service learning are endless. I was first drawn to The Modern Story because of the emphasis on service learning, teaching the students to “become change makers in their community.” I watched videos created by previous fellows where students had partnered with community organizations to bring attention to issues that they wanted to change and felt inspired. I set a goal for myself to complete a similar project if selected, and I am proud to be writing nearly six months later about service learning projects that we are wrapping up at two different schools.

UC Davis And The Militarization of Campus Police

By Bob Ostertag, cross-posted from Huffington Post

Yesterday [November 18th], police at UC Davis attacked seated students with a chemical gas.

I teach at UC Davis and I personally know many of the students who were the victims of this brutal and unprovoked assault. They are top students. In fact, I can report that among the students I know, the higher a student's grade point average, the more likely it is that they are centrally involved in the protests.

This is not surprising, since what is at issue is the dismantling of public education in California. Just six years ago, tuition at the University of California was $5357. Tuition is currently $12,192. According to current proposals, it will be $22,068 by 2015-2016. We have discussed this in my classes, and about one third of my students report that their families would likely have to pull them out of school at the new tuition. It is not a happy moment when the students look around the room and see who it is that will disappear from campus. These are young people who, like college students everywhere and at all times, form some of the deepest friendships they will have in their lives.

This is what motivates students who have never taken part in any sort of social protest to "occupy" the campus quad. And indeed, there were students who were attacked with chemical agents by robocops who were engaging in their first civic protest.

Since the video of the assault has gone viral, I will assume that most of you have seen the shocking footage. Let's take a look at the equally outrageous explanations and justifications that have come from UC Davis authorities.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi sent a letter to the university last night. Chancellor Katehi tells us that:

The group was informed in writing... that if they did not dismantle the encampment, it would have to be removed...  However a number of protestors refused our warning, offering us no option but to ask the police to assist in their removal.

No other options? The list of options is endless. To begin with, the chancellor could have thanked them for their sense of civic duty. The occupation could have been turned into a teach-in on the role of public education in this country. There could have been a call for professors to hold classes on the quad. The list of "other options" is endless.

The Destructive Impact Of Lewis Powell's Infamous Memo On Our Politics And Culture

In a previous article for Greenpeace, cross-posted here, Charlie Cray explored the legacy of the infamous Powell Memo, the 1971 memorandum that soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell prepared for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which mapped out a strategy to aggressively fight criticism of and challenges to corporate America from the media, liberal activists and the burgeoning consumer and environmental movements.  Charlie has now added more detailed analysis in four areas that Powell suggested corporations should focus: education, the Judiciary, the Media, and politics.  As we can now clearly see, this corporate blueprint has, as Charlie explains, forever changed the influence of big business on our political and cultural landscape.


Greenpeace Analyzes The Lewis Powell Memo -- Corporate Blueprint To Dominate Democracy

By Charlie Cray, cross-posted from Greenpeace's website

Forty years ago, not only was Greenpeace formed, but a then-obscure corporate lawyer (later appointed by President Nixon to the Supreme Court) drafted a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that forever changed the influence of big business on our political and cultural landscape.

As part of our investigation of the history and subsequent consequences of Lewis Powell’s Memorandum for the Chamber, Greenpeace has compiled a series of references and related analysis that trace specific corporate activities to the overall strategy that Powell sketched out in his memo.

In four inter-related pages, we describe how the Chamber and other leading members of Corporate America targeted specific public areas for increased influence, if not outright takeover:

Politics – With particular focus on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Lewis Powell advocated that corporations take a much more aggressive and direct role in politics. Since Powell’s day corporate lobbying expenditures and donations to politicians have exploded in size and relative importance, pulling elected officials away from various public interests towards the enduring priorities of big business.

Starving America's Public Schools

By Robert L. Borosage, cross-posted from Campaign For America's Future 

Wall Street’s excesses blew up the economy.  Now the question is who pays to clean up the mess. And across the country, our children are already paying part of the bill – as their schools are hit with deep budget cuts.  A new report – Starving America’s Public Schools:  How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates are Hurting our Nation’s Students – released today by the Campaign for America’s Future and the National Education Association looks at five states to detail what this means to kids in our public elementary and secondary schools.

Every study shows the importance of early childhood education.  Analysts at the Federal Reserve discovered that investments in childhood development have, in the words of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, such “high public as well as private returns” that the Fed has championed such investments, noting they save states money by reducing costs of dropouts, special education, and crime prevention.  Yet across the country, states are slashing funding for pre-kindergarten and even rolling back all day kindergarten.  Now only about one-fourth of 4-year-olds are served by pre-K programs.  Ten states have eliminated funding for pre-K altogether, including Arizona. Ohio eliminated funding for all-day kindergarten.

The Legacy Of Derrick Bell

By Inimai Chettiar, cross-posted from American Constitution Society

Professor Derrick Bell, who passed away on Wednesday, was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many. His actions spoke as loudly as his words and influence the work we do today at the ACLU. He was the first black law professor at Harvard Law School, yet in 1990 he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school hired a black woman for its tenured faculty. That didn’t happen until 1998, and by then Bell had moved on to NYU Law School, where he remained until the end of his career.

It is groundbreaking scholarship like that of Professor Bell that gives life to the ACLU’s current work. In his book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, he described, among other things, the forces that prevented Harvard from hiring black women as tenured law professors. Professor Bell (pictured) was not afraid to state the truth: that structural and insidious racism pervades our society, institutions, and thinking. He pioneered the development of critical race theory – which recognizes that racism is embedded deep beneath the surface of our laws and legal institutions. He explained that, even where there is no de jure segregation or explicit racism, there are often far more harmful subtle forces that hinder access to equality and result in de facto segregation.

In order to understand the structural nature of racism, we need to follow Professor Bell through the proverbial “looking glass.”  Things aren’t always what they seem. The work of Bell and other scholars showed that, in order to achieve true racial equality, it’s insufficient to eliminate de jure segregation laws if the majority of our institutions continue to be created by, for, and around heterosexual white men of privilege. When our societal or legal “norm” automatically leaves out women and people of color, it may look like these groups are asking for a handout or an “unfair advantage” when what they are really asking is to be included in the creation of our institutions and laws.

Take, for example, Judge Richard Posner’s criticism of the signature use of narrative and allegory in the legal writing of Professor Bell and other critical race theorists. Judge Posner argued that “by repudiating reasoned argumentation, the storytellers reinforce stereotypes about the intellectual capacities of nonwhites.” The very notion that “reasoned argumentation” is somehow intellectually superior to narrative and allegory as a means to explain legal theory is embedded in racism. (Not to mention that Plato - a father of Western philosophy - wrote in allegory.) Critical theorists explain that our entire system of legal education and scholarship was built by and for white men of privilege. Others are forced to fit these so-called “objective” academic criteria, or else be branded as not smart enough. But criteria for what makes someone the “best” cannot be objective when it is decided by the preferences of those in power.

Professor Bell eloquently identified and challenged the underlying inequalities that keep black Americans and other marginalized groups “at the bottom of the well.” These inequalities are reinforced by policies that provide inadequate resources to inner-city schools populated with poor black children, criminalize children’s behavior in these schools, fail to provide families with affordable healthcare, make healthy foods prohibitively expensive, selectively enforce drug policies in communities of color, strip away our voting rights, and build housing projects in environmentally unsound areas. The law doesn’t become race neutral just because it doesn’t mention race. It only becomes race neutral when it accounts for and corrects its disparate impact on people of color, and is built by and for all of us.

We are far from living in a post-racial society, and Professor Bell knew that. In 1992 he put forward the notion that black Americans were worse off and more subjugated then than at any time since slavery. Startlingly, right now this country controls more black men through our incarceration system than it ever enslaved. Black Americans continue to live unequal lives and have unequal futures, but yet society clings to the notion that racism no longer exists simply because the law no longer mentions race. A false belief in a post-racial society is dangerous and will prevent us from achieving true equality.

Had it not been for Professor Bell’s courage – the courage to walk away from jobs in protest, the courage to loudly state that racism remains, and the courage to continue to speak the unpopular truth until the end – racial justice advocacy would be far behind where it is today. We draw strength from his courage and hope to carry on his struggle with our work against structural racism in our education, healthcare, employment, voting, immigration, and criminal laws. As the ACLU fights on, we stand on the shoulders of this giant.

Inimai Chettiar, policy counsel for the ACLU’s Center for Justice, and Courtney Bowie, senior staff attorney for the ACLU's Racial Justice Project

The Moral Question On Taxes And Budget Cuts

By Robert Reich, cross-posted from his website

We dodged another shut-down bullet, but only until November 18. That’s when the next temporary bill to keep the government going runs out. House Republicans want more budget cuts as their price for another stopgap spending bill.

Among other items, Republicans are demanding major cuts in a nutrition program for low-income women and children. The appropriation bill the House passed June 16 would deny benefits to more than 700,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year.

What kind of country are we living in?

More than one in three families with young children is now living in poverty (37 percent, to be exact) according to a recent analysis of Census data by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. That’s the highest percent on record. The Agriculture Department says nearly one in four young children (23.6) lives in a family that had difficulty affording sufficient food at some point last year.

We’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression – with lower-income families and kids are bearing the worst of it – and what are Republicans doing? Cutting programs Americans desperately need to get through it.

Big Voice

My sister is producing this inspired and inspiring documentary that explores the lives of the top-singing students of the Santa Monica High School Choir, and its visionary choir director, Jeffe Huls.  As drastic budget cuts endanger both the quality of our public schools and their arts programs, here is a determined high school music teacher striving to create a thriving vocal music program that ignites in his students a passion for music, a sense of belonging, and the value of working hard to achieve their dreams.

Watch the trailer below and you will get a sense of why this film is so moving and so timely.  The project will be funded only if $40,000 is pledged by October 10th.  They are 45% there.  So, please, click here to support this important work, and share this post widely.
 

What can schools do?

 I've not written about education before but as a parent with kids in 6th and 4th grade in Oakland, CA public schools it is something I think about a lot. The schools in Oakland have a lot of challenges including very high levels of poverty and ever shrinking funding. In the national debate the problem always seems to be teachers and the solutions always seems to be destroying unions and starting charter schools. In the context of that debate an article in today's New York Times Magazine about a middle school in the South Bronx is a welcome reminder of how much more complex things really are. (I was particularly interested because I am a product of New York City public schools K-12.)

The principal, Ramon Gonzalez, seems like an amazing person who is fighting everyday to keep kids in school, help his teachers be better, and make his school a place of refuge in a very tough neighborhood. Yet he has to fend off his own superiors to prevent them from sticking a charter school in his building. The article makes a number of critical points about the current education debate.

First, charters are not the answer. We already know (pdf) that charters perform no better, and in some measures worse than conventional public schools. This is also true specifically in New York. Moreover, those schools that do succeed often have the benefit of more funding than public schools, often via private support.

The Times article also points out another troubling aspect of charter schools. The growing number of charters, which have been pushed hard in New York "skims off the neighborhood’s more ambitious, motivated families." Those schools "distinct advantage over 223, though. Their families have already chosen to be at a charter and have often jumped through numerous hoops to get there. This makes it easier for charters to create their own cultures. They can define the length of their days, dictate exactly how children dress and enforce strict codes of conduct. Those students — scholars, in charter parlance — who fall out of line don’t last." And where do they go, the regular public school of course. Moreover, while the idea of choice sounds great where does it leave children whose parents are not, whether because of poverty, lack of education, substance abuse, mental health issues, or any other reason, not able to do the research and advocacy that such systems require?

At the same time "as failing schools are shut down around González, a steady stream of children with poor intellectual habits and little family support continues to arrive at 223." To his credit, Principal Gonzalez "wouldn’t want it any other way — he takes pride in his school’s duty to educate all comers." However, the reality is that "the endless flow of under-performing students drags down test scores, demoralizes teachers and makes the already daunting challenge of transforming 223 into a successful school, not just a relatively successful one, that much more difficult."

Principal Gonzalez also points out that by destroying the idea of the neighborhood school you lose something both in the school and the neighborhood. He says "I don’t want to be part of the history of taking talented kids out of the neighborhoods and telling them to move on."

There are a few complaints about union rules, but for the most part it is about a partnership between teachers and the principal, and one that seems to be working. He does not see the Teach for American phenomenon as magic either.

“First-year teachers are pretty much useless,” González says. “To me, the ideal teacher is a third-year Teach for America teacher.” The problem, at least from where González sits, is that Teach for America requires only a two-year commitment. It entices the best applicants not only with the promise of changing lives in impoverished schools but also by presenting itself as a résumé-builder for elite institutions like Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company. “I’m trying to build people who are going to stay, who want to work with our kids,” González says. “This isn’t where they’re starting their careers; this is their life. We’ve had plenty of brilliant people here from organizations like Teach for America, and they lasted two years, because their hearts weren’t in it. I can’t afford that. That’s hurtful to our kids.”

Perhaps most important there is a fundamental recognition that poverty is "an immutable obstacle in the path of improving public education, one that can’t simply be swept aside by the rhetoric of raised expectations." Amen. Sadly, given the current situation in Washington and state capitals the kind of attention that these complex problems require seem unlikely to be forthcoming.