Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'education'
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) organizer Brandon Johnson, who is a black man, recently spoke about a conversation he had with veteran black educator Dr. Grady Jordan about racism in the schools today. Jordan told him, “Black teachers fought hard. This is a direct retaliat...
The inhuman and criminal attack by the Taliban on 14-year old Pakistani education activist, Malala Yousafzai, has been hijacked here in the United States to provide moral patina to America’s equally devastating wars in South Asia. Instead of a focus on the political con...
A lot more thought has to be paid to the question, “why Chicana/o Studies?” CHS are not the whim; they are not a fad. They are part of the historical reasons for the struggle of the Mexican American community to obtain equal protection. If we forget these reasons,...
Khageswar Benya and Panchami Benya from Muribahal block of Balangir district of Odisha, an Indian state, are the children of regularly migrating parents. For last five years they have been accompanying their parents almost regularly who have migrated to w...
It’s not often that a public school teacher gets the chance to debate a billionaire “reformer” about the future of education. But events in Chicago have been anything other than ordinary since the ...
When anything titled a “white paper” comes across my email, I usually ignore it. Why is truth always called “white”? Why not brown, yellow or black? Is it because black is considered negative, i.e., Black Friday, black as sin, Halloween, or death whereas white ...
Just when you thought American politics couldn’t get any more trite and tedious, here comes an ambassador from celebrity culture to lead us into a previously unknown sub-basement of banality. Yes, will.i.am was back on the Obama campaign trail this past week in the swin...
“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
— Frederick Douglass (1860 speech in Boston)...
With the advent of Neoliberalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption within many countries of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinsim. As a theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism removes economics and market...
Beirut.
As fall semester begins this week for colleges and universities, Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps and 12 campuses, continue to swelter under unseasonably high temperatures and heavy humidity with no early relief in sight.
Yet, there is final...
“The CTU is teaching the USA a lesson in working class love and solidarity. It’s a transformational moment for the membership of the CTU and its allies. How can they transform the horn honks, the raised fists, the friendly waves and the kind words of e...
Writing books and writing blogs are similar. They should be truth. If they were not the author loses credibility and his/her ability to convince suffers. This is how it should be. But Arizona is testing this rule of thumb.
The assault on the truth in Arizona mak...
The endless question in America is whom to blame when bad things happen and the question is asked beginning at an early age. Any present or past proprietor of a small child knows that when any thing bad happens the child’s first response is that someone else is respon...
Among the issues raised by the Chicago teachers’ strike is the one involving the villainization of labor. Yet, while teachers have been shamelessly conflated in the corporate media with the very gluttons who are in fact fleecing the teachers of their pensions and ot...
First, there was Madison, a welcome flash of lightning awakening us from the long, quiet night of labor passivity. The events came fast and hard and thousands flowed into the capital square and were ready for a showdown.
But, with a vacuum of street leadership, it ...
We were having a conversation in the teachers’ room and discussing the Chicago teachers’ strike and remarking on how the politicians and the media tried to bully the Chicago teachers with all this talk about how they were harming the interest of their st...
Now we know our ABCs. And charter schools get an F.
The Chicago teacher strike is over, but the assault on our nation’s children has just begun. As with all free market systems, the price is set high enough to ensure a profit for the companies doing business,...
A considerable degree of confusion appears to be attending the ostensible conclusion to the Chicago Teachers’ strike. Indeed, with various interests proclaiming victory, it is difficult to arrive at a clear understanding of just what the outcome portends. Before add...
Instead of the usual 16th of September celebrated in most Mexican American communities, MEChA students at California State University at Northridge hold an “Endependence Day.” The event has the blaring of the mariachis, the jarabe tapatio, and gritos, but i...
From my perspective as a native of Chicago, alum of its public school system, and activist of various sorts, little could be more gripping than this current Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike. Normally, the intriguing tales of social movement action occur in foreign coun...
The teacher must have a genuine interest in mental activity on his own account, a love of knowledge that unconsciously animates his teaching.
—John Dewey, How We Think[1]
...
Many crucial issues are at stake in the Chicago Teachers Union strike. But the school district’s insistence that student test scores constitute a major basis of teacher evaluations seems to have become a particularly contentious point, leading to the vilification of tea...
What would children gain from teachers who have the highest evaluations as measured by the metric that Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to implement for Chicago’s public school (but not charter school) teachers? This is precisely what three Columbia and Harvard economists...
The serious villagers have now spoken: the editorial boards of many of the country’s major newspapers including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, Mitt Romney, Rahm Emmanuel’s new friend Paul Ryan, Illinois’ “progressive” Senator Dick Durbin, Jesse Jack...
On Monday, September 10, 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike. The next day Linda and I drove up to Chicago, parked our car on the North Side, rode the “red line” mass transit downtown and arrived after the speeches were over and just as the big march began...