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'
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]
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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...
Mexico City.
The Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM) was founded in 2001, ostensibly by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then mayor of Mexico City, but spurred by the student strike at the much larger Universidad Autónoma Nacional de Méxic...
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the pesky little ankle-nipper charged in the first years of the Obama administration with dissing the left (“f…ing retards”), empowering Blue Dog Democrats and killing the public option in the Affordable Care Act, is Barack Obama writ obn...
“This was a strike of choice, a bad choice for our children and not necessary,” decried an irritated Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. 350,000 students and 26,000 teachers have stayed out of classes now for two days as contract negotiations take place between Chicago Public...
The judge peered down at Ashley Derrick from the bench and scolded her for being late to a 9 a.m. hearing in his Garland, Texas, courtroom. Derrick, 26, explained that she’d hit traffic coming from one of her two jobs as a phlebotomist. Her alleged crime...
In 2006, Marlyn, a mother who lives in Gwinnett County with her children, was surprised to hear that her son Kyle, a senior at Brookwood High School, had taken the ASVAB test. ASVAB or the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test is the military’s entrance...
The Chicago school workers’ strike is on. It is a real class war that must be won.
Enrolling about 400,000 students, with about 22,000 school workers, Chicago is the third largest district in the country, segregated as it may be. Chicago schools are the centripet...
Universities serve multiple purposes in a modern capitalist society. One of those purposes–the education of young adults–is a noble and worthy one. It is how this is done that is often less noble. If capitalism requires technicians and managers, it is te...
It’s impossible to exaggerate the national importance of the teachers’ struggle in Chicago. If the Chicago teachers’ union — 26,000 members strong — goes on strike, many critical yet ignored political issues will go into the national spotlight, exposing nas...
I have never much liked football. But after 20 years as a professor at the University of Texas, I have learned to hate football, and really hate Longhorn football.
I’ve also learned that some players hate the football machine as much as I do.
As a child, I...
When Joe Torre left as manager of the New York Yankees following the 2007 season, it was not without rancor. According to reports, Torre felt that, after years of faithful and productive service, he had been grossly disrespected by Yankee management. Torre turned down...
Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington, DC’s public schools, who left under a cloud after the mayor who appointed her, Adrian Fenty, was defeated in a re-election bid in which Rhee’s contentious tenure was the main issue, is at it again.
Rhee, a sha...
On May 10th, 1880 United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) teachers, counselors and paraprofessionals voted overwhelmingly (97%) to authorize a strike vote. The UESF strike vote was the first step of a two-step process for strike authorization. The vote was a big step for...
The Death of a Team Society pays more attention to its sports teams than to its children. Today in L.A. the world shattering concern is whether to keep the Lakers’ roster intact or break it up and get new players. A great deal o...
My own generation faced the Vietnam War. We were at risk of getting drafted, and then maimed or killed in an unwinnable battle against imagined evils.
Today’s young people are being drafted into an economic war that they don’t understand. It’s a s...
I am having trouble getting into this essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb or ignorant. My mother would say that the people conducting the war are malditos, mean. The reality is that the criminalization of rational thought goes...
During my twenty-odd years as a union rep in a big-time factory (a 44-acre paper mill), I had occasion to talk to over a hundred people about the things we most regretted in our lives. It’s true. That was our topic of discussion….regrets. Things we ...
Every prison has a story. At the Robert Scott Correctional Facility, in Michigan, the women were not allowed to touch one another or risk a “major misconduct.” Sharing, even a small piece of candy, was against prison policy and women were written up for lendin...
This article is adapted from a presentation I gave at California State University East Bay on May 16, 2012 at its Third Annual Diversity Day.
It is only the second time I have been to California State University East Bay, formerly California State...