Today's Stories

September 27 / 28, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
September 27 / 28, 2008

Quoting Friedman All the Way ...

Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

By TODD ALAN PRICE

We live in dubious times when staunch deregulators howl for vigorous and immediate regulation.

Lessons from the past

In 1983, the release by the Reagan administration of the report A Nation at Risk, launched over two decades of attacks on public education by right wing foundations and corporate pundits. Teachers and students were ill equipped to defend against the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute, just a few of the many shock troops aiming their sights on the public schools.

The document stated that we were losing the battle against economic powers such as Japan, "unilaterally disarming ourselves" by miseducating youth.

In a previous Fighting Bob article, Demolition Reauthorization, it was described how

"some of the loudest critics of public education, the Hoover Institution, the Fordham Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation and Fortune 500 corporations everywhere have partnered with the federal government in an effort to, they claim, save our public schools."

The strategy employed so successfully in this all out blitz of the media by supposedly august foundations and think tanks is to attack the public schools, try and drain them of funds through tax payer vouchers to private schools, then to 'save' the remaining public schools, placing them under increased regulation, and when they fail, restructure them and reopen them as newly reconstituted charter schools.

The collapse of the banking, investment and housing industry draws similar parallels.

Some of the same critics of public education have also roundly criticized government. . . until this last week.

As the feds buy up bad loans and "toxic" securities, the critics have found new hope in big government. Republicans and Democrats band together in a newly minted bi-partisanship. The current proposed buyout of the reckless speculation in the collapsed housing finance bubble dwarfs any previous efforts of big government to rescue finance capitalism from its worst tendencies. Indeed big government is under way, in an unprecedented scale of intervention with the Federal Reserve, not only to rein in the floundering "quasi-governmental" agencies of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, but also to throw a life-line to the Mortgage insurance/security agency, (AIG).

Aftershock

Naomi Klein explains this phenomenon when she writes of a pernicious "disaster capitalism" in the prescient document, The Shock Doctrine. Disasters, it seem, breed opportunity. There are only too many financial predators ready to take advantage of others' tragedy, be it war, lack of affordable housing or a decent education. They strike during the shock, quoting Friedman all the way.

In the case of New Orleans, the aftershock is truly tragic; the city, (as well as much of the Gulf Coast, lest we forget) devastated by flood, was truly doubly shocked when thousands of teachers were fired and hundreds of housing units were leveled. Ushered in with new force were "school choice" or vouchers by Bush and Congress, and a latent "Recovery School District" management style, based largely on the philosophy that a newly fashioned and deregulated system of Charter schools would work best.

With the recent demise of several investment banks, insurance companies, and "quasi-governmental" agencies, the nation and the world's financial markets left spinning, the obvious question would be (and following upon The Shock Doctrine's formula): how soon before the wealthy and connected benefit from the current economic meltdown and how much will the taxpayer have to pay to foot the bill?

Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, and AIG: Foes of Public Education

The Bush administration saved Fannie Mae, but Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ed Bernanke sat on their hands while the Lehman Brothers' stock went south. Then they became nervous and bought up AIG.

Fannie Mae survives, barely. Fannie Mae is also fond of charter schools. The Fannie Mae Foundation, the World Bank, and the Washington Regional Association of Grant makers have set up a Public Education Partnership Fund to implement 'reform' in DC Public Schools and to "develop charter school capacity."

Lehman is a notorious privatizer. As noted by educational statistician and writer Gerald Bracey (2003), they sponsored a conference in 1996 with the Center for Education Reform where they boasted: "we've taken over the health care system; we've taken over the prison system; our next big target is the education system. We will privatize it and make a lot of money." Lehman worked to set up a front group called Fight for Children which received, as noted by writer Basav Sen, Walton Family Foundation funding, and support from "Anheuser Busch, Bank of America, Citigroup, The Gap's Donald Fisher, Lockheed Martin, the Marriott Foundation, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, the New York Times, Northwest Airlines, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Verizon, Wachovia, and the Washington Post." Lehman's CEO made $17,000 an hour while the one hundred and fifty year old company tanked. Even the President's brother Jeb, brought in as a last minute advisor couldn't save the company.

AIG has close links to Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and his Broad Foundation. Broad is the long-time chairman of AIG Retirement. Eli Broad is the most outspoken advocate of the business model for education-treat school district like corporations, schools like "profit centers", students as "revenue sources". Broad's disciples now control or heavily influence public education in dozens of large urban centers, including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Oakland. Broad has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into charter schools-through direct donations to charter school chains like KIPP, Green Dot and Aspire, as well as by funneling money through the Silicon Valley-based New Schools Venture Fund. Eli Broad, and his close collaborator, disgraced former AIG chief executive officer Maurice "Hank" Greenberg (who was forced to resign as AIG CEO when he was caught fraudulently inflating the value of AIG stock a few years ago), are upset with the federal bailout of AIG. They want an even bigger bailout from taxpayers. Public schools that aren't "profitable" should be closed, says Broad-but AIG investors losses must be subsidized! Truly, privatization of profit, socialization of loss!

The deregulation agenda is occurring in the school districts in not only Washington D.C., and New Orleans, Louisiana, but in Chicago and elsewhere in Ohio, and despite tepid results (where those results are even released), Charters continue to gain support.

Charter Schools to the Rescue

In Chicago, where we work with teachers sharpening their knowledge and craft in graduate school and preparing for National Board Certification, teachers are overburdened and discouraged by the relentless before, during and after school preparation for standardized testing. They are told to not worry about social studies, and in many cases, to not even teach science as mathematics and reading consume the bulk of their curriculum. More and more teachers we work with have been handed scripted curriculum written by outside private contractors. When their schools fail to meet Annual Year Progress under NCLB, they face declining enrollment as students are recruited for the burgeoning charter schools growing in Chicago.

Last spring, despite vociferous community resistance, eighteen public schools in Chicago were permanently closed, reorganized with the complete replacement of building principals and teachers or reconstituted as new charter schools. These trends go forward with the substantial political and financial support from the Chicago corporate and banking leaders who typically live in the suburbs or don't send their own children to the schools they have come to control behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, the continuing expansion of charter schools undermines the teacher union movement as charters by law exclude unions. And in the past year the Daley run school system appears to have moved to silence community involvement in school operation by increasing the number of appointed local school leaders and attacking the integrity of school councils across the city. In this brave new world of alternatives to public schools, teachers become lone entrepreneurs in the spirit of the free market advocates who push for the replacement of public education in the United States. And all of this moves forward with Chicago school operations dictated by the mayor's office in alliance with the corporate school agenda of the Commercial Club of Chicago.

Renaissance 2010

But finally, and beyond the merit of Charter schools versus Public schools is the question: why can't we find the will to fix public schools? To fund them properly?

As stated by a Chicago group, Teachers for Social Justice, Charters are being used to replace public schools. Cited verbatim from their blog is the following assertion:

Renaissance 2010 is not just a school plan. It is part of a much larger plan for gentrification and for moving out low-income African Americans and some Latinos from prime real estate areas, in fact from the city altogether. These are the areas where the proposed school closings are concentrated. Gentrification is a central source of profit for developers, banks, and investors and a key element in making Chicago a global city of increasing inequality in housing, income, quality of life, and use of urban space.

Unfortunately, both major party candidates seem intent on expanding charter schools with Obama calling for a doubling of federal money for subsidizing charter expansion. And this support comes in the face of the 2006 Department of Education large scale study which showed public schools outperform charters on the limited, but mandated, measures being used to determine student learning and school success.

This is not to say that Charter schools or their advocates are all the same. Nor does this suggest that everyone who supports charters, supports deregulation, or supports in turn the dismantling of the public school system. As Joe Nathan pointed out for the magazine Rethinking Schools when the charter movement kicked into gear in the mid 90's, charter schools can serve as creative responses to needs unmet by the larger school system, and can offer alternatives that may inform and guide the larger public education system "to empower the powerless and to help encourage a bureaucratic system to be more responsive and more effective." Unfortunately, from the beginning of charter schools free market ideologues have sought to privatize and repackage large swaths of public education into another consumer choice option joined at the hip to the pervasive inequalities of market capitalism.

Much of the thrust of the current charter school movement, and certainly of the last twenty years of vouchers is clearly indicative of those educational policy makers who, with their corporate and foundation backers, see no problem in steering public funds to private and for-profit corporations. And it is those same foundations and corporations today, hat in hand, begging for handouts, who are responsible for the proposed and current deregulation and privatization of our commons. With the current track record comes the even more obvious question:

Why do we let them get away with it?

In this so far victorious war of the soon to be rescued finance industry super-powers against the public schools, disaster capitalism has made an impressive debut. The scenario of wrecking institutions in the public sector in order to save them with intervention by private capital has now spread like a wildfire that can only take hold in the rest of the public sector -- health, housing, and Social Security retirement income provision. Too bad for Lehman that they won't be around to share the rewards from this coming Golden Age of privatization and deregulation for which they can claim such a key share of authorship.

Todd Alan Price, author of The Myth and Reality of NCLB: Public Education and High Stakes Assessment & John Duffy, author and contributor to Democracy and Education, are professors of education at the National College of Education in Chicago, Illinois.

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