“Today we bring an end to a sad chapter in the life of a local union with great members, whose leadership lost their way, engaged in serious financial wrongdoing, refused to end their attempts to subvert the democratic processes of this union and failed to take action against reported decertification efforts,” said Andy Stern, the SEIU president. “This trusteeship is grounded in the clear facts found in Secretary Marshall’s report and the direct actions of Sal Rosselli and the officers of UHW.”

In a press teleconference a day before the SEIU takeover, Rosselli “strongly disagreed” with Marshall’s findings that he misused members’ dues placing them into a political action account to resist Stern’s policies. “No UHW official benefited from that.” The money in question, he said, went back to the union source from where it came.

As for the “democratic processes” of the union, the SEIU trusteeship eliminated UHW’s policy of elected representatives, suspended its constitution and by-laws, and seized its financial assets — all against the UHW members’ wish. One of the 100 elected officials removed by the SEIU is John Borsos, an administrative vice president in the Sacramento area, where 28,000 UHW members live and work. “The only people happy with the SEIU takeover are the bosses, especially those of nursing homes,” said Borsos. Asked why, he said, “SEIU negotiates agreements that give away gains for patients and workers.”

Like Borsos, Paul Kumar was an elected UHW official fired in the SEIU takeover. Kumar fleshed out some details of the SEIU approach to bargaining with nursing home owners. “Under these agreements the total cost of workers’ economic package was determined by a fixed formula and the elements of the package could be adjusted unilaterally by the employer,” he said. “No grievances could proceed to arbitration other than terminations. Workers were prohibited from publicly reporting any resident care concerns other than those for which reporting was legally required, under a clause that allowed employers to contest any such reports as attempts at ‘leverage’. The union was forbidden from advocating for or against any legislative or regulatory action impacting the nursing home industry without employers’ consent.”

Before the SEIU trusteeship, elected members of UHW such as Sharon Martinez, a medical transcriptionist and an elected shop steward at Sacramento’s Mercy General Hospital, took part in contract talks with their employers, in her case Catholic Healthcare West. Another result of UHW’s approach was the creation of a third-party mediation structure to judge workers’ claims that employers did not meet legal staffing levels for patients.

In Sacramento, a few days after the trusteeship, UHW members occupied their Midtown office building. Banners opposing the SEIU were hung on both sides of the doorway, where an unarmed security guard stood. UHW members milled about inside, bleary eyed but steadfast. They awaited the transfer of the building UHW owns to SEIU.

“Stern needs a court order to make us leave,” said Ricardo Hagen, a UHW homecare worker. He earns $10.40 per hour providing in-home care for a disabled and elderly woman. Hagen fears that SEIU will agree to California budget cuts that drop his pay to the state minimum wage of $8.00 per hour.

“We don’t want Andy Stern’s appointed leaders,” said Marcel Berry, an in-home care provider and UHW member. “He is trying to silence us.”

Robert Thyfault is a UHW shop steward for homecare workers in Sacramento. “I got a call last night from SEIU that its takeover was to save me from a lack of democracy. If the takeover was democratic, I would have voted for it.”

A short time later, SEIU took control of the UHW building. Stern’s appointed trustees, Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan, will be in charge of UHW from now on.

UHW leaders and rank-and-file members had contacted President Obama and his Labor Secretary-designee, Rep. Hilda Solis (D-CA), to prevent the SEIU trusteeship . . . to no avail. Nevertheless, they are continuing to call on Obama and Solis to investigate the national SEIU.

Obama, as a senator, backed the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA would make it easier for the nation’s non-union workers to join a labor union by signing a card. What about employees’ free choice to change unions?

One day after the SEIU trusteeship, ousted UHW leaders and rank-and-file members announced they would form the National Union of Healthcare Workers to represent workers who want to decertify SEIU as their representatives. The fledgling union filed election papers at National Labor Relations Board offices in Oakland and San Francisco on February 2 to represent 9,000 workers at 62 hospitals and healthcare facilities in California.

Rosselli predicted that Stern would oppose the organizing effort of the NUHW. “SEIU should get out of the way and let workers join the NUHW.”

This battle is far from over.

The locals to be merged into the new union of 240,000 workers are Local 521 in San Jose; Local 6434 in Los Angeles; and United Healthcare Workers-West in Oakland, whose leadership has become the target of SEIU International President Andy Stern by criticizing his corporatist strategy of trading workers’ rights and powers for an easy road to membership growth.

The SEIU claims that the new union of a quarter-million long-term care workers would be better able to build unity and resist spending cuts due to California’s growing budget deficit, a consequence of the collapsing real estate market. Among the services to be cut back by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal is the In-Home Supportive Services program, which serves 400,000 infirm and low-income Californians.

“Under the reorganization, California long term care workers will be among the most powerful political and economic forces in the state — positioned to fight draconian budget and wage cuts and to press for meaningful long term budget solutions in Sacramento,” said Michelle Ringuette of the SEIU in a press statement.

The UHW, with 65,000 members who labor in long-term care, opposes the SEIU’s bid for consolidation. The UHW says that it has a stronger track record than other health care locals and that, if the point were really to improve workers’ conditions, the thing to do is for workers to join the UHW, not for the SEIU to abolish it. On January 9, UHW President Sal Rosselli and 71 of the union’s elected officers sent a letter to Stern, requesting permission for members to vote on disaffiliating from the SEIU.

This UHW letter notes that the SEIU constitution provides a procedure for a disaffiliation vote within 60 days. So why not hold the vote? At the same time, however, the constitution forbids officers from supporting this ballot. According to the UHW, Stern requested the inclusion of this language into the constitution last year: “no officer of a local union … shall support or assist any efforts to dissolve, secede or disaffiliate from the International Union.” Those who violate this language are subject to disciplinary action.

Recent coverage of the SEIU vs. UHW conflict in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times has omitted this free speech issue. That omission influences the view of both unions in the court of public opinion.

Meanwhile, the UHW members’ vote to disaffiliate from the SEIU may become a moot point. Consider this. “National SEIU officials are expected to launch a hostile takeover of UHW” in a matter of days, according to a January 18 press release from Sadie Crabtree of the UHW. It looks like they are already making the first move for that.

If this takeover is allowed to happen, it will be on the watch of President Obama, for whom both the SEIU and the UHW campaigned last fall.

This aggression is an effect of the U.S. military-industrial complex. Take about a Goliath-like edifice. Consider what euphemistically goes by the term of the U.S. defense lobby. It contributed $10.5 billion to donkeys and elephants in the 2007-2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. “Lockheed Martin is the industry’s top campaign contributor,” the CRP adds.

President-elect Barack Obama, as an Illinois senator, was the top recipient of donations from this industry. He collected $379,837 in the recent cycle, according to data from the Federal Election Commission. Hillary Clinton, as a New York senator who opposed Obama in the race to be the Democratic presidential nominee, took in $146,973 during this period. Obama and Clinton, his pick to be the next U.S. secretary of state, collected 39 percent of all contributions to Democratic members of the Senate, who, on average, received $36,111, from the industry.

The proliferation of military bases and contractors in American congressional districts for decades illustrates this institutional process. It goes back to the depression of the 1930s, which led to the Second World War, the fall of the British Empire and the U.S. corporate-government assuming that role in the postwar era.

This period, called the Cold War, witnessed the emergence of the state of Israel. It gained conventional and nuclear weapons for reasons of power and wealth accumulation. This outcome required the active involvement of big business and the U.S. state.

Here is the thing. Palestinians have been in conflict with the Israeli state since its founding due to the former’s loss of land to the latter. That follows from the Israeli government’s advanced military, resulting from its congressional-financial-industrial-political relationship with the U.S. government and its corporate partners such as Lockheed Martin.

The Israeli government’s intent to liquidate Hamas connects with the U.S. military-industrial complex. Thus, Israel’s modern military machinery is on display in the Gaza Strip, where scores of Palestinians lie dead and wounded.

Meanwhile, the search for signs that the job market will improve soon is a grim task. On that note, California’s unemployment insurance system is struggling to meet the expanding ranks of the jobless through a program that gets its funds from an employer-paid tax.

According to Loree Levy, spokesperson for the state Employment Development Department, filings for unemployment insurance rose 78 percent between 2007’s third quarter and third quarter 2008.

As California’s home bubble and in turn set off a wave of job losses, the unemployment fund declined by 55 percent during the past year. EDD forecasts a $2 billion-plus deficit next year, and double that figure by 2010.

Based on past income, eligible California workers can receive unemployment insurance ranging from $40 to $450 every week for 26 weeks. If this period ends and workers are still jobless and eligible, they can file for federal extensions for up to 33 weeks in “high unemployment states” such as California.

As more people in the state lose their jobs, less people actually qualify for benefits. According to Levy, 45 percent of the 1.1 million Californians out of work in the third quarter of 2002 received unemployment insurance. In the third quarter of 2008, 35 percent of the 1.4 million unemployed received benefits.

The decline of jobless workers who receive unemployment insurance in California mirrors a national trend, said Joel Blau, an author and professor of social welfare at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In 1975, 75 percent of unemployed American workers received unemployment insurance, according to him.

There is more than one reason for this trend. Let us consider two of them.

According to the California EDD, “Self-employment does not usually qualify for unemployment insurance benefits coverage.” It is worth noting that the self-employed are part of the federal government’s monthly jobs survey of households, one of two measures the state uses to determine its rate of unemployment.

Then there is the job category of independent contractors. Employers are not required to cover the costs of the payroll tax for unemployment insurance for independent contractors, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations.

Looking to President-elect Obama, it is unclear what policy measures he will implement to address the fiscal crisis of the states, of which unemployment insurance is one piece. Recently, about 400 respected economists, including Nobel Laureate George Akerlof at UC Berkeley and Michael Perelman at CSU Chico, signed a letter urging Congress to stimulate state budgets by “extending unemployment insurance and increasing benefits for low and moderate income households who are likely to spend quickly”.

In the meantime, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed increasing the employer-paid tax for unemployment insurance. The employers who remain in business during the current downturn are sure to resist that policy through the state and local chapters of the chambers of commerce and the like.

The governor, who recently described the state’s growing budget deficit as a “financial Armageddon,” also seeks to decrease unemployment benefits from their present amount. Jobless workers, less politically organized than businesses generally, will be hard-pressed to resist that proposal, though such an effort is possible.

That exchange speaks volumes on the ideology of white supremacy. It has been and continues to be a mirage of unity between Caucasian lower and upper classes. That has been so in varying degrees since America’s colonial days of black and Native people’s dehumanization and subjugation. The same ideology drove Chinese, Filipino and Mexican people’s exclusion from the U.S. mainstream. Also in this outcast mix, seen initially as non-whites, were Irish, Jewish, and southeastern European immigrants to the U.S.

Cut to today. For white supremacy to help sustain the widening income and wealth gap in the U.S., elected leaders can and do conjure an “Other,” a darker and dangerous sub-human to build up and put down for reasons of public safety and security. McCain’s Minnesota rally illustrates domestic and foreign threads of this ideology.

I turn here to Diana Ralph of Canada. She has an important chapter on “Islamophobia” in The Hidden History of 9-11-2001. Ralph shows how anti-Muslim bigotry, a demonization of the “Other,” works for the U.S. political class in mobilizing a grass-roots anger and fear after the East Coast attacks of Sept. 11. One result has been a sort of silent consent for the torture of prisoners of the war on terror, mainly non-white Muslims.

On that note of armed repression, Islamaphobia dovetails with the U.S.’s “peculiar institution” of white supremacy. That ideology is the wellspring for much of the Obama character assassination rhetoric of McCain and especially Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential pick. An unclear number of their backers ape this vision, sadly.

I suggest that the tactic of baiting Obama as a racial Other comes in part as a response to the crumbling illusion of market competition’s benefits trickling down to the American people. Further, this approach seeks to defuse the short-lived rebellion from the populace of all backgrounds against Washington’s bailout of big creditors. The threat of a racially inclusive uprising from below of small debtors beset by a rising rate of home foreclosures, plus under- and unemployment, is real to upper class power. What horror!

Accordingly, McCain and Palin offer some white wage earners and pensioners a re-play of what African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois called the “color line,” the main contradiction of U.S. democracy. From this ideology of skin-color inferiority and supremacy emerges the straw man of Obama as a reputed Arab and all-around danger to America.

Transcending the class and race contradictions of U.S. democracy, Du Bois noted, could yield to the American people a truly popular politics. That is the future, a very difficult thing to discuss, indeed. Yet discuss and act on it we must, in the present moment. This process, I maintain, would create a logic of more class and skin color equality and unity where too little exists now.

Such a reformation of U.S. society has high hurdles to clear. One is the economics and politics of locking down the throwaway people who employers no longer need to produce wealth. Crucially, this trend of caging and politically weakening the nation’s low-income blacks and Latinos foreshadowed the Bush II administration’s creation of Muslim “enemy combatants.” Together, the uses of these incarcerated populations serve the agenda of economics and politics as usual at home and abroad.

Now is the time for more rational discussion of the reasons for and results of white supremacy in domestic and foreign affairs. Laboring women and men of America have much to gain here. This holds true no matter which candidate, McCain or Obama, becomes the next resident on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

* This article first appeared in Black Agenda Report

Just ask Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors Corp., and Alan Mulally, Ford’s CEO, who addressed senators on Sept. 12. The CEOs want a government loan of $25 billion for their companies to build fuel-efficient cars as energy prices spike and the U.S. economy slows.

Apparently, private lenders coping with the collapse of credit and housing markets are not up for extending such funding to Ford and GM. Both automakers have been losing profits and market share to foreign firms such as Toyota recently.

The U.S. taxpayer loan to GM and Ford would fund investment in new machinery, and new research and development. What could be wrong with that outcome? In brief, private lenders see new production lines for GM and Ford to make cars with better fuel efficiency as fraught with uncertainty.

Crucially in the U.S. auto industry, creditors and debtors have imperfect information about the future. Who can say with much accuracy what will be the return on capital lent to invest in new car-making machinery?

If the carmakers’ revenues exceed their expenses, the investment would pay off. If that future scenario reverses course, there would be a loss instead of a gain for debtors and creditors.

Now consider this. What would the carmakers do with their work forces using the new machines to make autos with better and cleaner fuel efficiency? Certainly, there would be job and wage cuts. Ripple effects from such labor force actions would help to weaken buyer demand for the new car lines. Fewer sales equal less revenue.

Moreover, what would Ford and GM do with their new machinery now operating at a reduced capacity? The companies would be hard-pressed to sell these machines to raise revenue to repay the private loans.

Would-be buyers of the machinery would drive a hard bargain. The carmakers would be fortunate to get but a small fraction of their purchase costs.

Unforeseen events can and do happen in the auto industry. Prices for any number of commodities such as oil, rubber and steel to produce and run cars will rise and fall. Foreign competition will shape demand and supply for auto fuel-efficiency in various ways. Nobody knows the future well enough to predict accurately such business outcomes.

Well, one thing is clear. Imperfect information about future business conditions for Ford and GM is part of the equation regarding their flight from private lenders to the U.S. taxpayer for new capital investment.

That wouldn’t be a government bailout, say the CEOs of Ford and GM. The government’s recent rescues of financial firms mired in the crash of credit and housing markets compel Democrats and Republicans to proceed with the appearance of caution in lending billions of taxpayer dollars to Big Auto. Call it the bipartisan consensus for U.S. carmakers.

I spoke with five classroom teachers in California’s capital city. They have a range of opinions about the state forcing all teachers to use standardized curriculum to raise students’ scores on achievement tests.

Bob Priestly, who currently teaches 7th-grade science at Sam Brannan Middle School in the Sacramento City Unified District, has a critique of the standard curriculum and achievement tests. He has been a teacher for 16 years.

“We aren’t drones now, but before standardized tests there was more freedom for teachers to create their own approaches to the subject matter such as life science,” he said. “Such freedom is unwelcome now and teachers can be administratively disciplined for that.

“The traditional middle school before standardized tests was a place where kids explored new things inside and outside the classroom in an ‘exploratory wheel’ of elective classes, such as art, drama, second languages, and shop. That’s been wiped out as a result of penalties for sub-par test scores. If they score under the proficient level on the tests, students can lose their elective classes and have to take up to two language arts and math classes each (per semester) to attain proficiency the next time.”

The test scores of Brian Laird’s students at West Campus High School in the Sacramento City Unified School District rank among the highest in the city and California. He currently teaches advanced placement and college prep economics and U.S. history. His students take the state tests May 1-14, the results of which he uses to find any instructional areas for possible improvement.

“Testing helps students only in as much as it helps me to teach the standardized curriculum,” said Laird, who began teaching in California’s Silicon Valley city of San Jose 12 years ago, arriving at West Campus in 2000. In his view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.”

Rose Penrose currently teaches 6th-grade English at the Natomas Middle School in Sacramento’s Natomas Unified School District. In her sixth year of teaching, she instructs three 88-minute classes of English, with 30 students in each. Penrose and her fellow teachers, by department and grade level, create a “pacing guide” to help them to identify when and how to teach in conformity with state curriculum standards for achievement tests, which her sixth graders began in mid-April.

“Having accountability and standards is good,” Penrose said. “They give everybody a measure of where we want to be. I know that my kids know the material, but the test phrasing can stump them sometime.”

Sheryl Tolson currently teaches second grade at the Anna Kirchgater Elementary School in Sacramento’s Elk Grove Unified School District. The fourth-year teacher’s 20 students took the standardized tests in mid-April. Test scores will be ready in August to help third-grade teachers pinpoint which instructional areas to focus on, she said.

“I will also get an idea for my next year’s class on how to teach students more effectively. If the students’ reading comprehension scores are low, for example, I can work harder on that.”

The federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which Pres. Bush signed in 2002, mandates that American students score higher each year on the standardized tests. In California grades 2-11, 37 percent of students’ Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program tests scores in math and language arts must reach the proficiency level, up from 24 percent originally, said Pam Slater, spokeswoman for the state Dept. of Ed.

“Every year the standards we teach are ratcheted up,” said Priestly, who teaches between 26 and 35 students in five classes for which he uses the state curriculum. The students in part learn about the processes of sex cell division and single cell division.

“We’re drowning in standards and tests, which are a vice squeezing students,” he added. “I’m driving students at a fast pace towards taking the tests and accomplishing so many standards.” The NCLB sanctions for STAR test scores weigh heavily on Priestly’s mind and those of his fellow administrators and teachers. “We’re all in this thing together,” he said, while lamenting the inadequate means which the NCLB law provides to schools to meet the federal mandates.

Slater of the state Ed. Dept. gave a nod to this aspect of the NCLB. “The federal funding issue has been a criticism,” she said.

Across town from Priestly, Debra Nordyke teaches kindergarten at the Del Paso Heights Elementary School in North Sacramento. Her five- and six-year-old students take tests on math (measurements and shapes) four times a year. Testing on language arts (reading and vocabulary) is three times per year.

“Testing has benefited the kids by improving their language arts and math skills,” she said. Her district and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (a $2.5-billion firm which calls itself “the preeminent educational publisher in the United States”) create the curriculum and tests which Nordyke teaches to. She has been teaching K-4 students for 23 years in the Del Paso Heights School District, one of several others which will join the new Twin Rivers Unified School District on July 1.

According to Nordyke, before the advent of the standardized curriculum and tests, teachers had to create their own. In that pre-testing era, this could be a stiff task for newer teachers. While acknowledging that standardized curriculum and tests have helped primary grade students to gain mastery of literacy and math, she noted that, before then, students and teachers had more time for art, drama, movement, music, and science. “That extra time improved students’ creativity and social skills,” Nordyke said.

California Senate Bill 376 created the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program in 1997. The California State Dept. of Education develops, reviews, and revises STAR testing and the standard curriculum, Slater said.

STAR tests for grades two through 11 have four subject areas: language arts, math, science, and social science. Student test scores are ranked from outstanding to proficient to basic to below basic to far-below basic.

Against this backdrop, a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Educational Policy Analysis Archives by scholars at the Rice University Center for Education raises crucial questions about state-federal policy relating to standardized tests and students who score sub-proficiently on them.

Rice’s multiple-year analysis of more than 270,000 Texas students criticized the use of a single standard to measure a student’s achievement. “The degradation of the curriculum into test drills, which have little relevance beyond the state test, distances students who otherwise wish to persist to graduation, exacerbating the likelihood they will leave school,” the study reported.

In other words, forcing schools, students, and teachers into a box of escalating standards alienates youth and thereby increases the likelihood of their becoming dropouts versus graduates.

Where is this 11-year trend of state standards that marry school curriculum to STAR tests headed? In California and nationally, school districts and county education departments with tests scores below NCLB mandates face penalties pegged to the number of years in which annual progress falls below the measure of proficiency. The penalties for being out of compliance with this NCLB mandate put such under-performers into the “program improvement” category. The NCLB penalties range from replacing school staff in year three to a state takeover in year four. And that’s not all. “Once schools are in [public improvement] for five years they can be forced into privatization,” write Steven Miller and Jack Gerson in their article titled “The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools.”

California’s state education board approved a new approach to program improvement crafted by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell on March 13. As with students whose scores are sub-proficient, programs are ranked according to their need for improvement: intensive, moderate, light, or other.

Del Paso is in the category of “other,” having narrowly missed federal accountability targets. The district has been placed in year three of program improvement status, said Fred Balcom, director of the accountability and improvement division at the California Education Dept.

Priestly is working with two Sacramento-area schools that are in multi-year program improvement. He declined to name either school.

Below-level STAR test scores are hardly the lot of Laird’s students at West Campus High School. There, 500 students apply for 200 open slots in the 800-member student body. That number is roughly a third of the enrollment at high schools such as Burbank, Hiram Johnson, Kennedy, and McClatchy in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

In Laird’s view, the state curriculum is generally “helpful to have” as a “map for instruction.” However, Laird thinks that some of the textbooks he uses with his students are “incredibly simplistic.” Maybe that helps to explain this response to standardized education.

Students dislike the STAR tests, according to Laird. Such a stance put teachers in a dicey spot. “We ask students to please do their best on the tests. That helps to keep us in the good graces of administrators and politicians.”

There have been 11 years of momentum to unify California’s school standards to improve students’ test scores. This trend of standardizing education comes from the dawn of industrial capitalism, not always easy to see, given the misleading appearances of school accountability that can fog such history. In brief, the capitalist system spawned factories with work forces tied to the time clock to boost productivity, the amount of goods and services workers create per hour. A class of owners sought to remove labor creativity from their hired help and replace that with uniformity for reasons of control and profit.

To be sure, private profit is not a driving force in U.S. public schools. But forcing an industrial regimen of conformity upon the learning process can and does push youth and their teachers away from classroom time for creative discovery, thanks to the NCLB law.

What current learning standards backed up by the force of federal and state laws assume but fail to actually make is the case for one way to best measure youth’s learning and teachers’ instructing. It should be no surprise that the satisfaction of students and teachers in the politically charged regimen of K-12 schools is a mixed bag.

Apparently, raising the tax rate on corporations and the rich to increase public school funding is not a good lever. Wonder why? According to the Economic Policy Institute, “Between 1960 and 2004, the average tax rate fell by nearly 14 percentage points for the top 1% of earners, while it has increased slightly (from 15.9% to 16.1%) for earners in the middle 20%. The shrinking share of corporate taxes combined with an increase in payroll taxes has helped widen income inequality.”

Against this backdrop of a growing gap between the “have-mores” and the rest of the American people, NSVF welcomes small and big investors. You may have heard of the latter. Try the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Robertson Foundation, Irvine Foundation and Walton Family Foundation.

According to Julie Petersen, NSVF communications director, “We support both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, but tend to call this support “investment” in both cases because our financial support comes with the sort of active, hands-on guidance that a venture capital investor would provide to a tech startup. In both cases, our ultimate goal is social impact, rather than financial return—although in cases where one of our for-profit companies is sold or goes public, any returns we generate are returned to NSVF for re-use.”

Crucially, the NSVF helps investors identify “the market they are addressing.” As in real estate, location is the key. Thus the best sites are “several key cities, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Oakland, and New Orleans.” Why these communities? The answer is their “size, history of underperformance and potential for transformative change.”

In plain English, education entrepreneurs can have their way with populations whose living and working lives are defined by an inequality of resources. Due to decades of falling public and private investment, such inequality is widespread in many big-city neighborhoods which the NSVF targets.

In a capitalist society, investment creates jobs for workers to produce goods and services for sale in the marketplace. Absent that process, poverty grows, with current joblessness for some at Depression-era levels. Take the 35.7 percent unemployment rate for African American teens this January versus a rate of 27.9 percent last October, the Labor Department’s household survey reported.

Meanwhile, in under-funded public schools in low-income communities, NSVF investments have increased the number of charter (contract) schools. The city of New Orleans is one example where this privatizing process is underway. Recall that inequality harmed people in this American city well before Hurricane Katrina struck there in 2005, which FEMA worsened.

In New Orleans and across the US, charter schools owners, politically connected to business leaders and elected officials, can and do void employees’ labor union contracts. One NSVF investor, the Gates Foundation, knows the drill. It invested in the chartering of Sacramento High School five years ago. The St. Hope Corp. gained control of Sac High under the guidance of Kevin Johnson, ex-NBA all-star, current land developer and candidate for mayor in the capital city.

The trend of chartering public schools requires private funds. That, in turn, also sends a pro-market and anti-union message to parents, students and teachers. In this way, NSVF philanthropy helps to expand a kind of union-free efficiency for America’s new education entrepreneurs and for US society. It’s all about using “powerful levers” for “social impact.”

“Each semester I have faced being kicked out of classes due not to my grades but to being late paying student fees,” she said. “At times my professors have let me stay in their classes until I can pay. Many of my friends are also struggling this way.”

A former CSUS professor concurs with Henley. She lent students money to pay their school fees. Then the professor carried those costs as her VISA debt.

Olgalilia Ramirez is the director of governmental relations with the California State Student Association. Rising education fees “are a great concern for middle- and low-income students,” she said. Her debt from attending CSUS since 2000 will be $35,000 upon graduating with a master’s degree in sociology this spring, said Ramirez.

And fees will rise 10 percent at CSU and eight percent at UC in 2008-2009 under the budget of GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Current resident undergraduate fees are about $7,000 at UC and at CSU $3,000, respectively, said the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office. These amounts vary by campus.

News that inflation has been rising at a three percent annual rate nationally since 2002 is cold comfort for CSU and UC system students. They have seen their fees nearly double over the past six years, according to Tuition Relief Now, a student-led coalition. The Berkeley-based and all-volunteer group has crafted a solution to the problem of escalating public university fees: qualifying the College Affordability Act of 2008 for the November election.

Henley and scores of unpaid students, parents, and university advocates representing a total of 30 CSU and UC schools are hard at work to collect 434,000 signatures of registered voters by mid-April to put the initiative on the ballot. If they succeed and voters approve the measure, students at the state’s public institutions of higher education would gain. The math of the proposed initiative is straightforward.

Beginning in 2008-2009, the measure would freeze fees for five years for resident undergraduates at CSU schools. Their UC counterparts would have to await adoption of a fee freeze by the system’s Board of Regents.

But won’t hundreds of thousands of students paying less to attend California’s public universities increase the $14.5 billion deficit in the state general fund? That’s the shortfall which the governor proposes to shrink with budget cuts across the board, including slashing nine percent from higher education spending in 2008-2009.

The proposed five-year freeze would reduce revenue from students’ fees by about $1 billion, or one percent of the state general fund. Yet the state would more than make up for that by raising the tax rate one percent on personal income of $1 million and up, the top bracket, to a rate of 11.3 percent. This surcharge on California millionaires would add nearly $2 billion a year to the general fund budget, beginning in 2009-2010.

Senate Democrats chose Sen. Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento to replace President Pro Tem Don Perata of Oakland after voters defeated Proposition 93 recently. (The measure would have reduced state lawmakers’ terms by two years. However, incumbents such as Perata could have served a total of a dozen years in a combination of terms in the Assembly or Senate, or 12 years in a single house.)

Crucially, Steinberg spearheaded an increase of the personal income tax on California millionaires of $1.5 billion to fund mental health services, which voters approved in 2004. Surely, the state’s millionaires do not cheer another tax increase. That would cut their consumption and redirect it to public university education. Further, if state voters approve such a proposal for the benefit of CSU and UC students, what is to stop further tax hikes on the well-heeled for other public services? Why, such government intervention could spread to other states.

According to the LAO, 60 percent of the new millionaire tax would fill the void left by the freeze of student fees at CSU and UC schools. The remaining tax revenue would flow to K-14 school spending. After the CSU and UC fees are unfrozen in year six, fee increases could not exceed the annual percentage change in the California Consumer Price Index. That would create some price stability for students where little now exists.

Tuition Relief Now has funding for the proposal in part from the Greenlining Action Fund. It’s the political wing of the Greenlining Institute in Berkeley, which calls itself a “multi-ethnic public policy research and advocacy institute.”

Go to www.tuitionreliefnow.org.

The university and Sodexho, the French multinational firm, see the matter a bit differently. These two parties, however, have made some concessions to part of Sodexho’s work force in talks which excluded the workers. UC Davis and the company, for example, decided to give non-student (career) workers, about a third of the Davis total, pay raises of $1.00 to $3.00 per hour in mid-October. Hourly wages of student workers, the bulk of employees, stay the same. Meanwhile, a number of career workers who got wage hikes also had their hours cut, said Max Alper, lead organizer for AFSCME Local 3299. The union represents food-service employees at the other nine UC campuses and five medical centers.

In this “win some, lose some” situation at UC Davis, the Sodexho food-service workers earning higher wages with lower hours now are hard-pressed to address the problem. The reason for this is simple. They and their student co-workers labor without a union contract in place. Absent a union to represent them in workplace matters of hours and wages with their corporate employer, Sodexho workers are a little like cats without claws in a fight. Thus the plight of being private-sector workers who want union representation brings the Sodexho workers and their allies full circle to the labor conditions that sparked the Davis labor solidarity movement early this year.

In an echo of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the American South, two dozen people sat down in a non-violent civil disobedience rally at a Davis intersection in support of the Sodexho workers this May 1. Police arrested the protesters on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly. Later, the Yolo County DA chose to prosecute them. Pre-trial motions, which include the role of UC Davis in the prosecution of the demonstrators, continue February 4, Alper said.

In the meantime, the company has agreed with UC Davis to pay a greater share of the health-care coverage for the career workers, plus a monthly $100 stipend to help offset their living costs in general, effective January 1, 2008. The union-free UC Davis contract with Sodexho is set to expire in June 2010.

Briefly, health insurers want reform that shifts dollars to them to offset a slide in their employer-based business due to soaring premium prices. The governor’s plan to mandate health insurance differs from that of Núñez/Perata, Assembly Bill 8, which he vetoed on Oct 12. AB 8 has different insurance requirements in terms of who pays and the amount paid. But neither reform gets at the root causes of the health care problem.

The basic story is simple. Investors own the big health insurance firms. What the insurers don’t spend on health care is profit for investors, elected by nobody. To protect their profits, investors fund politicians of both parties.

Managers for investors’ money have a legal responsibility to them. That puts investors’ needs first and patients’ needs second. Wealth comes before health. That is the law.

In short, the insurers’ profit motive is the problem with the health care system. The California governor and two top state Democrats are perpetuating this problem and calling their solutions reform.

There is a better way to fix California’s broken health care system. State Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) is the sponsor of Senate Bill 840, the California Health Insurance Reliability Act. Under SB 840, the state government would become the single middleman payer, replacing many for-profit insurers.

Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 840 after the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed it in Sept. 2006, as thousands of Sacramento County employees walked off their jobs partly to protest the rising costs of health care.

Recall SB 840 had its day in the 2007 media sun, thanks to the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. The labor union, which backed Prop. 186, the single payer health care measure on the 1994 state ballot, turned out its female-majority membership to the debut of Michael Moore’s film Sicko in Sacramento’s Crest Theatre this spring. Earlier that day, he testified to the Legislature about the failures of the health care system such as the harm that for-profit insurers cause ill people when delaying and denying them medical care.

The CNA/NNOC joined the AFL-CIO this March and backs SB 840 instead of AB 8, which keeps insurers squarely in the business of financing the delivery of health care. The AFL-CIO’s California Labor Federation supports AB 8. The stance of CNA/NNOC reveals differences in the labor union movement over its relations to the Democratic Party, which takes money from the health care business, like the governor and GOP.

SB 840 began to fade from the media radar screen at the Capitol this July. SB 840 becoming the law would be the end for health insurers. That would end their donating to politicians and buying ads from media outlets. These powerful interests have millions and millions of reasons to maintain this status quo.

Under single payer health care in California, there would be, basically, an expansion of what exists now under Medicare, the federal program for the elderly. There’s no profit motive in the delivery of health care under this single-payer system, which Congressman John Conyers’ (D-MI) HR 676 bill would extend to all U.S. citizens. Crucially, the cost to administer Medicare is a small fraction of what private health insurers cost.

Medicare is not socialized medicine, a term of fear mongering that conceals more than it reveals. In short, Medicare is a single payer for medical providers: chiropractic, dental, emergency services, hospital, home health, infant maternal and long-term care, mental health, outpatient services, physical therapy, prescription drugs, primary and preventive care, rehabilitation (extending to substance abuse), surgical and vision care.

SB 840 will be moving forward at the Capitol in January 2008, said Sara Rogers, a consultant to Sen. Kuehl. Meanwhile, grassroots support is growing for a California constitutional ballot initiative in which voters can decide the fate of a single payer health care measure in November 2008.

“The California Health Security Plan would be free — no co-pays, no deductibles, no premiums — and would provide quality health care to all Californians,” said Jim Smith in a press release. “The Initiative has been submitted to the California Attorney General for a title, summary and issuance of petitions to put it on the ballot. We expect to have the petitions this November.”

A single payer system would end the state’s health care problem that is harming vast numbers of people, such as the seven million who lack medical insurance. Equality of health care should be a birthright for all Californians. Go to www.CaliforniansforHealthSecurity.org.

“I resigned my position with the U.S. foreign service on March 19, 2003, after the invasion of Iraq ,” Wright said. “I thought that going to war in an oil-rich Muslim country was a recipe for trouble for us.” Two other U.S. diplomats resigned with her.

For the past five and a half years, she has been calling publicly in the U.S. and abroad for an end to the Iraq conflict. Wright joined Cindy Sheehan, the Vallejo mother whose serviceman son Casey died in Iraq, in antiwar protests outside the president’s summer home in Crawford, TX, two summers ago.

Later, Wright went to Jordan to meet with Iraqi parliamentarians to discuss their plans for a peace process in that embattled nation. Americans should pressure Congress to likewise pursue a peaceful solution to the Iraqi situation, she said.

Wright admits to not being a pacifist, having been involved in military actions during a government career under eight administrations. She backed the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks. Three months later, Wright was part of the initial State Department team that assisted in the reopening of a U.S. embassy in Kabul.

However, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is an illegal war of aggression, she said. This lawbreaking has many layers. One is the U.S. government’s torture of prisoners of war, people the Bush administration has termed “enemy combatants.” They have not been charged with a crime nor have a trial date, and apparently, are to be held until the war on terror ends at some unsaid date in the future.

The crackdown on Americans’ civil liberties is the other side of this backwards political trend, Wright said. Her critique of Bush’s domestic policies highlights several illegal actions. A recent instance is the gaining of access to citizens’ personal lives from telecom firms such as Verizon, without a court order.

Wright and Susan Dixon have written a book titled Dissent: Voices of Conscience, profiling 24 government whistle blowers here and overseas who have taken ethical and moral stands against the war on terror. One of these dissenters is Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department lawyer. She raised objections to the questioning of John Walker Lindh, the supposed American Taliban, with no attorney present. For her efforts, Radack was fired and put on a government no-fly list.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies have been reviewing Dissent since July, Wright said. She held up a copy of her book at SCC.

“I can’t let you look at it,” she said with a laugh, her eyes twinkling. “I signed a letter before resigning my job to let the government read writing of mine on foreign affairs and to cut out any classified information before publication.”

Yet Wright says she used only open source material to avoid that issue. “But the government can slow roll you,” she said. For more information, visit voicesofconscience.com.

What makes the U.S. so unlike other rich nations? There is no single answer. At the top of a list is the power of the business class to shape policy-making and the lives of the nation’s populace. In The United States Since 1980, economist Dean Baker focuses on the policies that have set the country on a business-friendly path. There have been far-reaching effects.

“For most of the population of the United States, the quarter century from 1980 to 2005 was an era in which they became far less secure economically, and the decrease in security affected their lives and political attitudes,” he writes. “It is important to note that this decrease was the result of conscious policy, not the accidental workings of the market.”

Baker steers clear of ambiguous terms. This is a great help to the layperson searching for clear-headed policy analysis of this critical 25-year period. Ruling interests’ efforts to roll back the popular gains of the vast mass of workers has marked this time.

“The change in the ground rules affecting the market distribution of income has had a much greater impact on the country than the change in tax and transfer policy,” Baker writes. Accordingly, a changed rule of critical impact driving the wage gap between Americans on the bottom and in the middle and those at the top has been in employee-employer relations. What does (not) happen at the point of production, the workplace, matters.

Take U.S. trade policy, an area of expertise for the author. He explains, clearly, how this policy has put the country’s factory workers into job competition with workers in developing nations paid as low as one-tenth the wage rate in the stateside manufacturing sector. The same trade policy leaves intact licensing and professional barriers for U.S. doctors. This shields them from global job competition. Thus the pay structure of American physicians is such that they earn twice and more than their counterparts in other industrialized countries. Baker offers policy alternatives, not just doom and gloom.

For instance, he suggests standardizing rigid licensing and professional requirements for physicians. Of course the American Medical Association opposes that. Meanwhile, some 800,000 U.S. doctors earn double and more versus their European counterparts. If the licensing and professional barriers to foreign doctors practicing stateside ended, U.S. health care would become more affordable for those with low and middle incomes, Baker argues. As he makes clear, high-wage earners such as doctors get government protection. The vast bulk of the U.S. labor force is on its own.

As secure union jobs faded, several negative outcomes have become part of the national landscape. One place to look is at the lives and jobs of workers most likely to be union members, African Americans. An eighth of the total populace, blacks make up half of the nation’s prison population. Baker, asserts, based on international data, the U.S. is totally off the charts from other rich countries in this policy of racial imprisonment. Such policy follows structural unemployment.

Baker’s book has seven chapters and an epilogue. In chapter two, he sets the stage, domestic and foreign, as Jimmy Carter ends his one-term presidency. Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election speeded up a national policy shift favoring upper-income Americans at the expense of those in the middle and on the bottom. While Reagan’s fiscal policy benefited the well-heeled, his labor-management policies were noteworthy. For instance, he fired striking federal air traffic controllers. The relative silence of action from the U.S. labor union bureaucracy on this change in public policy was deafening. Later, private-sector employers aped Reagan’s anti-labor union policy, terminating striking employees and hiring replacement workers during contract negotiations. “Most Europeans would still consider it outrageous that a worker would lose her job because she went on strike, as did most people in the United States before the PATCO strike,” Baker writes. He compares and contrasts the policies of the U.S. and other developed societies throughout the book. His use of figures and tables to illustrate the policy impacts of such changes on most working Americans is helpful.

As the Reagan White House waged war by proxy against Nicaragua , administration and CIA officials broke a law that barred funding of such mercenary forces, called the Contras. Despite the efforts of a special prosecutor who investigated this secret and illegal financing scheme, none of the government officials were held accountable. In Baker’s view, this law-breaking helped to institutionalize a trend of unilateral deception in the executive branch of the U.S. government. The parallels to the domestic and foreign policy machinations of the George W. Bush White House since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks are as plain as day.

In the 1988 presidential campaign, GOP candidate George H.W. Bush, racially appealed to some white voters. He linked the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed violent felonies against a white couple during a prison furlough in Massachusetts under Governor Michael Dukakis, also the Democratic presidential candidate. The political use of an individual’s skin color to taint an entire race harkens back to the Reconstruction era. White racial supremacy is a feature of U.S. society that shapes public policy.

A foreign policy outcome of the Soviet Union’s decline as a superpower was the rise of U.S. power on the U.N. Security Council, according to Baker. The first President Bush, who inherited rising federal budget deficits from Reagan’s increased military spending against the so-called Soviet threat, used the council to impose economic sanctions on the Iraq populace after its leader and former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait. The sanctions lasted 14 years and strengthened his rule until the March 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation. For Iraqis, “many had to go without basic necessities and medical care,” Baker writes of U.S. policy that punished civilians by design. The policy was a war crime. It should be so named.

President Bill Clinton won the White House from George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election. Though the latter’s popularity ratings rose sharply after the U.S. defeat of Iraq, Baker notes economic pressures reversing that jingoistic spurt. To wit, a national recession from summer 1990 to spring 1992 slowed job growth and real wage increases. A business-friendly Democrat, Clinton’s response to the American people’s concern about work and pay was to continue President Bush’s drive for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Baker analyzes how and why Clinton ’s support for NAFTA was not about freeing trade but advancing a global model of the marketplace for the benefit of powerful domestic interests. One is the U.S. pharmaceutical sector. It relies upon government–granted patent monopoles that hike the shelf prices of prescription drugs by triple digits over their production costs, Baker explains. This policy illustrates government protectionism for corporate America to the harm of hourly wage earners and pensioners generally.

Baker places NAFTA in a global context, which U.S. economic reporting rarely does. He compares NAFTA with the European Union’s “social charter.” White House policymakers crafted NAFTA in part to flood Mexico with corporate American agriculture, which bankrupted scores of Mexican peasants, forcing them to become laborers who earn wages a fraction of their U.S. counterparts. By contrast, the EU provided a funding mechanism to bring the poorer regions of Europe up to those of the richer regions. The climb of living standards in Ireland is a success case in point, according to Baker. NAFTA was not set up to bring Mexican’s living standards up to Americans’.

Monetary policy was a key stimulus to the economic expansion under Clinton. Baker details how Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan ignored the conventional wisdom of the economics profession that cutting interest rates and allowing the unemployment rate to fall below six percent would cause inflation. Greenspan oversaw multiple interest-rate cuts during Clinton’s second term. And the national jobless rate dropped from just under six percent in the beginning of 1996 to four percent at the end of 2000. There was no simultaneous climb in the inflation rate as job creation increased.

Greenspan’s cheapening of credit, however, stimulated a stock market boom which busted in 2000. Later from its ashes emerged a housing boom. Baker carefully details the reasons and results of both speculative bubbles. His crisp writing style is instructive in moving below the surface structure of the economics profession and economic reporting to flesh out the class interests of policies behind the rise and demise of the stock and housing markets. Baker demonstrates his assertions with data that the general reader can comprehend.

The Clinton administration sold a U.S. aerial attack on the Yugoslav republic of Serbia as a humanitarian intervention to rescue Albanians in Kosovo during spring of 1999. According to Baker, “the civilian population of Serbia incurred a substantial portion of the casualties from the U.S. bombing.” This military action under a Democratic president, like the 1991 Iraq war on the watch of a Republican president, injured and killed scores of non-military combatants. These war policies are crimes of war, or the legal term lacks meaning.

The crimes of September 11, 2001, when hijackers crashed four airlines into East Coast targets helped the George W. Bush White House to make sweeping changes in federal law enforcement policy. Congress, for example, approved the Bush-backed PATRIOT Act, Baker writes. Most members failed to read the bill’s provisions. As he recounts, the White House’s case to invade Iraq — from its links to the attacks of September 11 and weapons of mass destruction — had more holes than Swiss cheese, with fateful consequences for both nations. One of those has been the administration’s use of the National Guard from the Gulf Coast states for duty in Iraq , which weakened the response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in summer 2005.

Baker and his colleagues at Washington ’s Center for Economic and Policy Research have been working against the political campaign to privatize the U.S. Social Security system. The 2000 bust of the stock market harmed workers’ retirements invested in the stock market. This outcome soured President Bush’s attempt to win political support to divert Social Security payroll taxes into the stock market. Baker’s book contains a nice summary of the case for (Wall St.) and against (Main St.) privatization of the popular system.

While U.S. superiority in weapons systems is nearly useless against the anti-occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq , the sun is also setting on the nation’s day as the world’s biggest economy. China and India, the two nations with bigger populations than the U.S., are gaining ground fast, economically and politically, Baker observes. “Yet, foreign policy planners largely assume that the United States will be the preeminent world power for the indefinite future.”

His book on the changed structure of the U.S. polity and economy between 1980 and 2005 is a must-read to better know this quarter century and grasp the many policy challenges ahead. The debate to change the nation’s system of health care is one example. Baker’s analysis of that is a good place to grasp what is at stake for the status quo and the working many.

Are you a renter now in the US? If so, perhaps thoughts of ditching that arrangement with a landlord and buying a home are dancing in your mind now that nation’s housing prices and sales are dropping and homeowner foreclosures are rising. Is it the time to buy a home?

If this question is rattling around your head, consider this, lest you are over-burdened with money and can afford to part with yours. Home buyers need solid data, above and beyond advertising and marketing, to make an informed purchase. Fortunately, Washington , DC’s Center for Economic and Policy Research has updated its snappy Housing Cost Calculator for people just like you, based on Uncle Sam’s data.

Enter the home price, down payment, mortgage rate, tax bracket and future sell-date, and you will get the “net cost of owning.” The calculator compares that to the cost of renting for the same period of time. Check it out.

Besides a home sale price in the future less than the initial purchase price, there are fees and commissions to consider in owning a house. Call these hidden costs, if you will. Whatever your term, you will be paying these costs to play the home-buying game.

Of course, your family and friends who are still employed in the mortgage and real estate industries that are shedding jobs left and right might not like you for using the Housing Cost Calculator numbers. You might do just that, though, and decide you’re better off renting than buying. Why? The simple reason is the calculator relies on one important assumption: that the historic rise in U.S. home prices the past 10 years will return to the “more normal historic trend.”

Funny how mainstream economists and pundits failed to see that home prices over the last decade diverged from trend prices, which bubbled up and up, thanks in no small part to the “easy money” policies of the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, whose new book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, is just out and headline news.

Helping to propel the U.S. home bubble, the Chairman cut, again and again, the cost to borrow money. His monetary policy followed the bust of the dot-com/hi-tech stock market bubble that, in turn, spawned the 2001 recession underway prior to the September 11 attacks on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, the once-growing U.S. housing bubble is shrinking fast. This deflationary trend of falling home prices and sales means a lot of pain and suffering for working people who bought houses at the bubbly peak, scores of whom agreed to terms that put them financially at-risk. Many of them would be in better shape if they had access to the CEPR’s Housing Cost Calculator before buying a home.