– Chitto Harjo (Crazy Snake), address to the Special Senate Investigation Committee for the Indian Territory, Nov. 23, 1906

Chitto Harjo, Crazy Snake, was the leader of a dissident band of Creek Indians that stood in opposition to the political leaders of the Creek Nation during the early years of the twentieth century. They would come to be known as “Snake Indians” in deference to their recognized leader.

The Snakes were motivated by their opposition to the allotment of Creek lands and the efforts to assimilate Creek people in violation of the terms of the Treaty of 1832 between the United States and the Creek Nation. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and the Curtis Act of 1898 the U.S. Government sought to break up the communal land bases of the remaining Indigenous Nations and allot the land in small plots to individual Indians with the “surplus” lands left over going to new waves of Anglo-settlers.

Harjo had travelled to Washington with a delegation of Creek leaders attempting to obtain the support of President Theodore Roosevelt for the terms of the treaty. Finding little or no support, Harjo returned to Oklahoma and called for the establishment of a separate traditional Creek government at the Old Hickory Stomp Grounds.

The Snakes urged tribal towns not to participate in the allotment process and began to engage in open conflicts with individual tribal citizens who did participate in the process. Chitto Harjo remained an ardent opponent of allotment and assimilation till his death in 1911.

What is apparent from Harjo’s words and actions was his position and perspective as a traditional Muskogee Creek. He stood in opposition to any attempt by the government of the United States to denigrate the sovereignty of Creek Nation. He stood opposed to the Creek National Council that was colluding with the Americans and the individual Creeks who were accepting the allotment of Creek lands. He was an ardent proponent of the Treaty of 1832 which he saw, correctly, as a formal agreement between two sovereign entities. He knew full well the price paid by the Creek people for the Treaty of 1832, the loss of their traditional homelands in southeast and the horrors of the “Trail of Tears” that lead them to the Oklahoma territory.

Chitto Harjo saw himself as a citizen of an Indigenous Nation and understood his relationship to the government of the nation that had colonized Creek territory. His loyalties and allegiances are obvious to any who examines his life and work.

As we look back at Harjo’s example we must ask ourselves how we, as Indigenous People, relate to the political power structures that exist around us. Like Harjo we need to ask, “What has become of the relations between the Indians and the white people?”

Divided Loyalties, Conflicting Interest

There is much to be learned from the terms that some of us have grown accustomed to using as self-identifiers. We generally give little thought to the implications of “Native American” or “American Indian” nor do we seriously examine the rhetoric that attaches itself to these terms. If we were to examine that rhetoric and pay close attention to the words being spoken in the name of “Native America,” we would get a much clearer picture of the struggles postulated by the Indigenous leaders today compared to the battles fought by leaders like Chitto Harjo a century ago.

On January 26th, 2012 Jefferson Keel, the President of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) delivered the tenth annual State of Indian Nations Address. The speech is often portrayed as the definitive description of the status of the native nations within the United States.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Chitto Harjo’s impassioned speech to U.S. Senate Committee in 1906 and the words of President Keel in 2012 has to do with the clarity of position and identity provided by Harjo.

Where Harjo provides distinct lines of separation between Nations and Peoples giving deference to Creek sovereignty we find much less clarity in the words of the NCAI President. The contrast is very apparent when President Keel articulates his vision for the political entity he terms “Our America.” Lacking in his speech is a defined acknowledgement of the separate sovereign status of native nations, Keel instead points to a linked destiny as he states… ”Our nations are committed to the success of the United States of America.” Where Harjo had stressed the importance of treaty rights and self-determination as the best strategies for the Creek Nation, Keel tells us that our goals need to be centered on greater participation in the U.S. elections and a more direct role within the American political system.

Harjo understood that for native nations the struggle for treaty rights and self-determination was a struggle for what freedoms they could retain in the face of a colonial reality. The struggle for self-determination is, after all, a struggle for freedom and the responsibilities that true freedom brings. After centuries of oppression large portions of the indigenous population cling to the concepts articulated by the colonizer, such as “trust status” and “domestic dependent nationhood,” and shy away from the obligations and responsibilities that true freedom bring.

Paulo Freire, the critical theorist, examines the syndrome in some detail:

“The fear of freedom which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined.”

“The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.”¹

We are being told that the Presidential election of 2012 will afford native America an unprecedented chance to engage in the U.S. political system. Under the Indian Country Today headline “President Obama’s Million-Dollar Native Fund-Raiser,” we are told: “In a sign of growing tribal political clout, 70 Indian officials attended a first-ever Native-specific campaign fund-raiser with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. on January 27.” Tickets for this event started at the reasonable price of $15,000 apiece.

For some perspective let us quickly review some basic demographic figures for the indigenous population living within the borders of the United States of America. You can rest assured that the 70 tribal officials at this gala where representative of the 40% of federally recognized tribes that operate gaming enterprises. As a whole the native people comprises less than 2% of the U.S. population and are the most impoverished of all ethnic groups. Native people have the highest rates of teen suicide, the highest rates of teen pregnancy, the highest high school dropout rates, the lowest per capita income and the highest unemployment rate.

In over two centuries of American colonization, our people have been reduced to the poorest, most impoverished levels of society. We have struggled to maintain what aspects of sovereignty and self-determination were not stripped away by the plenary power of the U.S. Government and watched as the monolithic monster of western capitalism continues to devour the land and resources that have sustained us for a millennium. Now we are lead to believe that our answer lies in handing over a million dollars to help the election campaign of the current American emperor?

In response to the million dollar donation President Obama told the gathered tribal officials that he was committed to making sure that “we” get the relationship between the U.S. and tribal governments’ right. His promise to native people that “Your children and your grandchildren have an equal shot at the American Dream.” The reality, of course, is that the million dollar night will have little or no effect on the vast majority of the indigenous population but will make the gaming interest that produced most of the political payoff more secure.

The argument that is made in defense of this tactic is that it offers the only way forward for our people; we must after all be practical. Only by investing ourselves within the American political system can we have any hope of our voices being heard within the corridors of power.

Among my people, the Houma, this strategy has been put forth many times. Written accounts of our attempts to gain the ears of the rich and powerful are well known.

In 1921 Jean Baptiste Parfait, a Houma community leader, lead a delegation from the lower bayous to the Lafourche Parish seat in Thibodaux. They made the two day boat trip to meet and lobby Congressman W.P. Martin for a school for Houma children. Indian children were excluded from the all-white public education system with the only access to formalized learning coming from sporadic missionary efforts.

Unfortunately for the Houma, there would be no direct assistance from the congressman other than his forwarding the request to the Federal Office of Indian Affairs. This did little to address the problem and there would be no school for Houma children in the near term.

Of interest to our discussion is a short description of the Houma written in correspondence inspired by the visit to the congressman.

They are poor it is true, but they are devout Christians, loyal citizens and staunch Republicans. At the last Presidential election their undivided votes aided in carrying the 3rd Congressional District solidly for President Harding and Congressman Martin.²

This was the pattern at the time and the one that continues, to some extent, to the present day. Politicians come into the Indian community and express their great concern for the plight of the Indian people. The people are encouraged to vote for candidate “A” because they have paid attention to the tribe and have promised to remember the needs of the Houma community when they are elected.

The issues within the story illustrate perfectly the reality of the struggle for political influence and the futility of the strategy. The Houma case for inclusion in public education went as far as the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1917 and was laid before Congressmen, Governors, and Presidents for years on end. In the end, the basic need for education for the Houma People would remain unmet for generations. It would take the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the conclusion of a lawsuit aided by its passage that would finally open the doors of public education to Houma children. Gaining the ear of a congressmen in exchange for votes forty years prior had done little for the cause, victory for the Houma came from fighting from the outside and not access to the inside of U.S. politics.

Even the precious gaming compacts of the fortunate few tribes that have them are serious breaches of any concept of genuine sovereignty. Compacts are made subject to the input of local and regional powerbrokers as well as federal machinations. All these players are given the ability to control or influence any legitimate exercise of self-determination or economic independence on tribal land.

So again we ask the question, what are we fighting for? Are we content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the emperor, or can we set our sights on regaining the ability to feed ourselves? Can we stand again as free men and women like our grandparents. or will we continue to bend our knees to the will of the colonizers?

Admittedly our Nations today lack the ability to seize power as we once did but we can commit our communities to move towards real self-determination with every step we take. If we really believe in the rhetoric that we preach then should we not be obligated to walk that path? Have we not given up enough ground in the last two centuries?

If we ask these questions of ourselves with sincerity of heart and listen closely with earnest expectation then perhaps we will hear again the voice of the Dragon as it carries across the ages…

Should we not therefore run all risks, and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further loss of our country? Such treaties may be all right for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me, we will have our lands. A-Waninski, I have spoken. — Tsi’yu-gunsini, Dragging Canoe

1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
2. Ernest Coycault to L.M. Gensman, 1 Dec. 1921.

It is a seeming admission that the entirety of Israel is situated on historical Palestine, something few Jews care to admit. It is similar to how few Canadians or Americans care to admit that their states are erected on the territory of Indigenous nations. However, Herskovits also writes of Israel’s “44-year long occupation of the Palestinian Territories.” Is it an occupation only of the Palestinian Territories or is it also an occupation of the entirety of historical Palestine? Some may quibble that it is now formally an international state by virtue of United Nations Partition Plan of 1948 and UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (although not ratified by the UN Security Council).² Did the UN have legal right to partition Palestine in the first place? Did the UN act according to moral principles in partitioning Palestine? If not, how can it be at all legitimate? Ratification is secondary to deliberate theft of a land belonging to another. There was no Israel at any time in Palestine.

Herskovits writes that “…this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.”

If guilt is called for, should the West’s guilt be confined to one Holocaust? Should the West not feel guilt over the American Holocaust,³ as professor David Stannard calls the genocide wreaked by Europeans on the Original Peoples in the western hemisphere? There are also the genocides in Australia and elsewhere that were perpetrated by Europeans.

Herskovits takes aim at hasbara: “Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality.”

She credits “scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives” for bringing the justice of the Palestinian cause greater exposure, with a focus on Gilbert Achcar and his book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.

Herskovits often writes disparagingly of “pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.”

Herskovits is a survivor of human barbarity. The experience guides her:

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

Racism

Referring to Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust, Herskovits argues against the defamation of an entire group of people: “It is only among ‘reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists’ that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.” What Herskovits does not mention is that Zionists were in league with Nazis.⁴ It does not make right any racism expressed by an out-group, but it is important to note those casting stones are living in glass houses.

From Achcar: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons.” Activist scholar Noam Chomsky wrote, “Contempt for the Arab population is deeply rooted in Zionist thought.” Arabs are Semites.⁵

Herskovits says “end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.” First, Herskovits is grounded on human rights; the “ethnocentrism and expansionism” (I would phrase it “racism and colonialism”) must end. However, “anti-Semitism” is an incorrect term, unless it refers to the minority Hebrew-speaking Mizrahi Jews; the more accurate term would be “anti-Jew” if one is referring to prejudice against Jews. However, animus borne of crimes committed against oneself, one’s kin, one’s people/faith is not racism. If a group of marauders stole my money, beat me to a pulp, and burned down my abode, would it not be preposterous afterwards to call me an anti-marauder? Why should the already stigmatized victim be further stigmatized as being racist?

The ADL defines racism thus:

Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics. Racial separatism is the belief, most of the time based on racism, that different races should remain segregated and apart from one another.

This definition would apply to few Arabs; but it definitely applies to most Zionist Jews.⁶

What Arabs — especially, but not confined to, Palestinians — feel is anti-the evil done by Jews; it is not anti-Jew. There is a massive difference. That Jews despise Germans for what the Nazis did to them, does that make them anti-Teutons? Or does it make them anti-the evil done by Nazis? If Jews share the feelings expressed by the holocaust denier, according to Noam Chomsky,⁷ Elie Wiesel

There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart against silence. Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate–healthy, virile hate–for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead.⁸

then, despite the illogic of his writing⁹ these Jews are guilty of racism because — as should be quite apparent — the sins of the ancestors should not be visited upon the descendants.

Trivializing War Crimes: Whose Suffering Was Greater?

In the documentary, Defamation, Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir depicts how Zionists and the state of Israel use “anti-Semitism” and the Holocaust as themes in sustaining Israel as the Jewish state. In one scene, American Israel Public Affairs Committee head Abe Foxman chides his Ukrainian government hosts.

Shamir narrates: “Foxman is concerned about the Ukrainian government’s comparison of the famine in the Ukraine before World War II with the holocaust.”

Foxman to president Viktor Yuschenko’s special advisor: “One thing that you need to be sensitive about is not to link it [inaudible]… Be careful that it not be played as your genocide, our genocide because that will be counter-productive on all sides.”

The argument smacks of supremacism: that no one may compare their genocide with the genocidet of Jews. Should such a depiction be unassailable especially knowing that the WWII holocaust is not exclusive to Jews and that Jews were not the most numerous victims?¹⁰ Is not the loss of all human life – regardless of ethnicity, religious persuasion, gender, sexuality, etc. – equally deplorable and lamentable?

Sadly, it appears as if Herskovits is making an argument for the supremacy of the victimhood of Jews during the WWII holocaust and denying a role as genocidaires by “pro-Israel ideologues” in her article. Echoing Foxman, Herskovits, by using Achcar as a foil, depicts the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.”

She further quoted Achcar as saying peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered.

Dealing with this excerpt from Foxman-channeling Achcar leaves one feeling perplexed. Let’s examine the assumptions. Do tragedies occupy space on abstract planes? Are genocides, massacres, atrocities to be numerically ordered into some scale of – for want of better language – least evil to evilest? Even if these assumptions hold, Achcar undermines his preceding words by implying that magnitude does not add to or take away from one’s suffering. What does Achcar want to say? Putting the pieces together, it sounds like Achcar is saying: We Arabs are suffering at the hands of Jews, but you Jews suffered more than us.

Herskovits seems torn because next she proffers, “In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either.”

I would agree with this. Yet, then she carries on with a comparison: “This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?” Herskovits does not immediately answer her question, although she does bring up “ethnic cleansing” later in the essay. It is a comparison that relegates the tragedy experienced by the Other to another “plane” — implicitly below that of genocide. The WWII holocaust is genocide, probably the genocide, in Herskovits’s mind. In Herskovits’ mind, the Nakba does not rise to the “plane” of a genocide.

Is “ethnic cleansing” not genocide?

Three researchers in Jerusalem — Rony Blum, Shira Sagi, and Elihu D. Richter – and Gregory H. Stanton, a research professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at George Mason University, as well as the founder and president of Genocide Watch tackled the terminology of “ethnic cleansing.”

The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ is used as a euphemism for genocide despite it having no legal status. … Bystanders’ use of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ signals the lack of will to stop genocide, resulting in huge increases in deaths, and undermines international legal obligations of acknowledging genocide. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ corrupts observation, interpretation, ethical judgment and decision-making, thereby undermining the aim of public health. Public health should lead the way in expunging the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ from official use. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide, leading to inaction in preventing current and future genocides.¹¹

Historian Ilan Pappe, in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, courageously acknowledged the expulsion of almost 800,000 people, the destruction of 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods, and the Zionist atrocities against Palestinians.¹² A question arose, however, if Pappe fudged on the definitional question of genocide.

Pappe wrote, “Ethnic cleansing is not genocide, but it does carry with it atrocious acts of mass killing and butchery.”¹³ Pappe considers 1948 is a “clear cut case, according to informed and scholarly definitions, of ethnic cleansing.”

Writer and activist Gary Zatzman demurs,

Ilan Pappe is one of those who fudges this question. He says what the Zionists do today in Gaza is genocide, but what they did in Mandate Palestine since 1947 and in the West Bank since 1967 was ethnic cleansing. DISINFORMATION ALERT! …

It is ALL genocide. The intention of the Haganah was to genocide the Palestinians. It’s very convenient to say, à la Golda Meir, that the Zionists didn’t think of the Palestinians as a people or nationality, just an inconvenient obstacle. The FACT is they prepared and executed genocide. It doesn’t matter, either, that the Zionists didn’t get all the Palestinians in one fell swoop, but have dragged it out over the last 58 years. It is still genocide. To suggest the survivors of the Judeocide were incapable of such a thing, which seems to be the only substance at the heart of the liberal Zionists’ argument, is utter nonsense. Were these survivors not psychically damaged by what they experienced before they were “liberated”? Such people were the ideal human material to set upon the Palestinians like wild beasts.¹⁴

Article 2 (a,b,c, & d) of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide seems to apply well to the case of 1948 and also today:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin would assuredly recognize 1948 and subsequent actions by Jews as genocide, which he described:

[A] coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.¹⁵

Lemkin saw genocide as two-phased:

[O]ne, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor’s own nationals. Lemkin sees “genocide” as a crime against humanity involving myriad actions intended to “destroy or cripple permanently a human group.¹⁶

Herskovits ponders: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

Herskovits is a holocaust survivor trying to be open-minded and fair. It doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work because it serves as a diversion with the very genuine and ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people in their homeland at the hands of Zionist Israeli Jews. Instead, it comes across as an attempt to prioritize the suffering of Jews as opposed to the suffering of all others.

Herskovits shows antipathy for violence and sympathy for the victims of violence. She seeks a solution. She posits education. Surely education is important.

However, education must acknowledge the fact that, despite differences in skin color, beliefs, cultural practices, etc. we are all human beings, endowed with equal human rights. History is in the past, and attempting to gain prominence from the elevation of one’s own suffering and the diminishment of the Other’s suffering indicates a moral backwardness. Attempts to reify past events in a group’s history and raise them to a plane above other groups of humanity reveals miseducation. The lessons of history have been unlearned or abused. For what good reason should humans who show mutual respect and equally share the land and resources fight each other? There is no reason that the wrongs committed by our ancestors be repeated by the present generation. Education should teach that violence is anathema and should never be used to solve disputes, for though military victory might evince physical or technological might, it also evinces moral weakness. Humanity must en masse dismantle the infrastructure, language, and media of war and violence everywhere.

1. Annette Herskovits, “Nazism, Zionism, and the Arab World,” Dissident Voice, 21 May 2012.
2. Resolution 273 is contingent upon Israel implementing UNGA Resolution 181 that defines the borders of Israel and Palestine and UNGA Resolution 194 that recognizes the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
3. See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (London: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4. See Jews Against Zionism and Anti-Semitism, Melbourne, Australia, Nazi-Zionist Collaboration, (Britain, BAZO-Palestine Solidarity and AZAN in co-operation with JAZA: 1981); Lenni Brenner, “The Zionist Operation Was a Success, the Jewish Patients Died,” Dissident Voice, 31 October 2009.
5. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and The Palestinians (South End Press Classics, 1983,1999). Chomsky, also wrote, “Anti-Arab racism is, however, so widespread as to be unnoticeable; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate.”
6. See Kim Petersen and B.J. Sabri, “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11, and 12. Dissident Voice, December 2007-January 2008.
7. Quoted in Mickey Z., “Elie Wiesel: Madman or Commissar?” Press Action, 6 June 2004. as saying: “… people like Elie Wiesel were carrying out their usual function of serving Israeli state interests, even to the extent of denying a holocaust, which he regularly does.”
8. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time.
9. What conclusion should one draw from “The Germans did their best to teach us but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate.” and “Every Jew… should set apart a zone of hate–healthy, virile hate–for … what persists in the German.” It sounds to this writer as if Wiesel said Jews did not learn to hate but that they hate Germans (not Nazis. Imagine the outrage if one wrote Jews instead of Zionists?)
10. The numbers vary among sources. See, for example, “World War II Casualties,” College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, San Francisco State University; “World War 2 Casualty Statistics,” Second World War History; and “Casualties Numbers by Country,” WWII Archives.
11. Rony Blum, Gregory H. Stanton, Shira Sagi and Elihu D. Richter, “‘Ethnic cleansing’ bleaches the atrocities of genocide,” The European Journal of Public Health Advance Access, 18 May 2007: 1-6. See also a critique of Blum et al. by Kim Petersen, “Bleaching the Atrocities of Genocide: Linguistic Honesty is Better with a Clear Conscience,” Dissident Voice, 7 June 2007.
12. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oneworld Publications, 2006).
13. Pappe, 197.
14. Quoted in Kim Petersen, “Nakba: The Israeli Holocaust Denial,” Dissident Voice, 18 March 2007.
15. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide.” In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation — Analysis of Government — Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79-95. Available at prevent genocide international.
16. Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide as a Crime under International Law,” American Journal of International Law (1947), 41(1):145-151. Available at prevent genocide international.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised …
The revolution will be live.

— From the 1970 hit song by Gil Scott-Heron

Last week, the city of Philadelphia’s school system announced that it expects to close 40 public schools next year, and 64 schools by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of its current enrollment, and thousands of experienced, qualified teachers.

But corporate media in other cities made no mention of these massive school closings – nor of those in Chicago, Atlanta, or New York City. Even in the Philadelphia media, the voices of the parents, students and teachers who will suffer were omitted from most accounts.

It’s all about balancing the budgets of cities that have lost revenues from the economic downturn. Supposedly, there is simply no money for the luxury of providing an education for the people.

Where will those children find an education? Where will the teachers find work?  Almost certainly in an explosion of private sector “charter schools,” where the quality of education – from the curriculum to books to the food served at lunch — will be sacrificed to the lowest bidder, and teachers’ salaries and benefits will be sacrificed to the profits of the new private owners, who will also eat up many millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies.

Why does there always seem to be enough money for military expansion, prisons, bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy, but not enough for education—or for jobs, housing, health care, or old age pensions?  These are not “welfare” but are part of the social contract for which we pay taxes and make social security payments.

In an article reprinted on Truthout on May 10th titled “Why Isn’t Closing 40 Philadelphia Public Schools National News?,” Bruce Dixon posed this answer:

The city has a lot of poor and black children. Our ruling classes don’t want to invest in educating these young people, preferring instead to track into lifetimes of insecure, low-wage labor and/or prison. Our elites don’t need a populace educated in critical thinking. So low-cost holding tanks that deliver standardized lessons and tests, via computer if possible, operated by profit-making “educational entrepreneurs” are the way to go.

Lifetimes of insecure, low-wage labor or prison”—this is very close to the “indentured servitude” that was abolished along with slavery by the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1865.  The freed slaves are being recaptured by debt, beginning with the debt of school loans, followed by credit card debt, mortgage debt, and health care costs.

As was cynically observed in a document called the Hazard Circular, allegedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts in July 1862:

[S]lavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.  [Quoted in Charles Lindburgh, Banking and Currency and the Money Trust, (Washington D.C.: National Capital Press, 1913), page 102.]

The quotation may be apocryphal, but it graphically conveys the fate of our burgeoning indentured class.  It also suggests the way out: we must recapture the control of our money and banking systems, including the issuance of debt-free money (“greenbacks”) by the government.

Meanwhile, in Other Unreported News . . .

That alternative vision was put before a conference in Philadelphia in late April that drew delegates from all over the United States.  The theme of the first Public Banking in America conference, held at the Quaker Friends Center on April 28-29, was that to fix the economy, we first need to take back the “money power”—the power to create currency and credit.

Led by keynote speakers Gar Alperovitz and Hazel Henderson and highlighted in an electric speech by twelve-year-old Victoria Grant, the conference was all about solutions.  As summarized by OpEdNews editor Josh Mitteldorf:

There were two visions expressed . . . . The first is the very practical idea that states and cities around America could be rescued from insolvency if they had their own banks, instead of relying on commercial banks to borrow money through bonds. Tax-exempt bond issues supply money to states and municipal governments typically at 5 or 6% interest, while banks these days are able to borrow from the Fed at 1/4% per year.

The second vision is . . . the radically-subversive idea that the system we have for introducing money into the economy is a boon for the banks, but perhaps a major drag on our economy. Perhaps a simple, direct system of money creation by the Treasury Dept instead of the Fed would put an end to cycles of recession, and create a foundation for long-term prosperity.

Banking is a huge leech on our economy. 40% of every dollar we spend on goods and services — 40% of all that we create and all we consume — is siphoned off the top as bank interest in one form or another. (Calculations of Margrit Kennedy). The US Government is in the absurd position of paying interest to a private bank for every dollar that is put into circulation. The Federal Reserve system has privatized the power to create money, which, according to the Constitution, ought to belong to Congress alone. Presently, interest on the national debt costs the Federal government $500 billion in 2011, and (because of structural deficit spending) it is the fastest-growing portion of the Federal budget.

Five hundred billion dollars could be saved annually just by refinancing the federal debt through our own central bank, interest-free.  This is not an off-the-wall idea but has actually been done, very successfully.  Among other instances, it was done in Canada from 1939 to 1974, as was detailed by the youngest and oldest speakers at the conference, 12-year-old Victoria Grant and former defense minister Paul Hellyer, founder of the Canadian Action Party.  Another Canadian at the conference, Toronto Councilor Kristyn Wong-Tam, has proposed that the Toronto city council could improve its finances by forming its own bank.

The direct solution to the economic crisis, urged by veteran money reformer Bill Still, would be for the federal government to simply create the money it needs, as the American colonists did by printing paper scrip and Abraham Lincoln did by printing greenbacks.

But cities and states don’t need to wait for a deadlocked federal Congress to act.  As Wong-Tam has proposed for Toronto, they can divest their public revenues from the too-big-to-fail banks and put them in their own publicly-owned banks.  These banks could then do what all banks do: leverage capital, backed by deposits, into money in the form of bank credit.

This newly-created bank money would then be available for the use of the local government interest-free (since the government would own the bank and would get the interest back as dividends).  Among other possibilities, the money could be used to restore the schools.  This would not be an expenditure but an investment, as illustrated by the G.I. Bill, which provided education and low-interest loans for returning servicemen after World War II.  Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested in the G.I. Bill, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues.

Legislation for public banks has now been introduced in 18 U.S. states, on the model of the highly successful Bank of North Dakota (BND).  Elaborated on at the Public Banking conference by Ed Sather and Rozanne Junker, the BND is currently the country’s only state-owned bank and has been a major factor in allowing the state to escape the recent credit crisis.  North Dakota is the only state to boast a significant budget surplus every year since the economic downturn of 2008.

Ellen Brown noted that 40% of banks globally are also publicly-owned.  These are largely in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), which also escaped the credit crisis, largely because their public banks did not rely on derivatives and, unlike private banks, lent counter-cyclically to cushion their economies from the downturn.

Conference speaker Samuel Giles proposed that even public universities could set up their own banks, which could then leverage university monies for the university’s own use, rather than giving those assets away to Wall Street to be speculated with and lent back at much higher interest rates.

Innovative Solutions for Pennsylvania

Speakers Michael Sauvante and Mike Krauss noted that efforts are underway in several Pennsylvania and Ohio municipalities to create public banks.  One possibility is for public banks to take an aggressive role in ending the foreclosure crisis by acquiring abandoned and foreclosed homes by eminent domain.  These homes could be added to the asset base of the bank, which could extend credit to restore them and then sell or rent them at reasonable rates.

Krauss noted that Philadelphia already has a strong effort underway to create a “land bank”—a bank to acquire, rehabilitate and create productive uses for the city’s more than 40,000 vacant properties—and legislation (HB 1682) has been introduced in the state legislature to enable this effort.  But the land bank proposed is not designed to function as a depository bank that leverages funds into credit.  Rather, it would simply work with appropriated funds or bond revenue. This is a positive step toward addressing a real need, but it could be enhanced by turning the land bank into a public bank—a chartered bank having the power to create money as credit on its books.

The efforts for developing public banks in Pennsylvania are being led by the Pennsylvania Project, which was a co-sponsor of the Philadelphia conference and is supported in its work by the Public Banking Institute and the Center for State Innovation.  The Pennsylvania Project is creating partnerships with other Pennsylvania public policy organizations to introduce legislation for a state Bank of Pennsylvania in 2013, after elections are held and a strong foundation of support has been laid.

Revolution Without Bloodshed or War

We live under a tyranny today that is just as intolerable and unjust as that in 1776, but violent revolution is no longer an option.  Our oppressors own the military and the media, and their FEMA camps are waiting for us.

If change is to come, it must be peaceful and legal, beginning with a revolution in the minds and hearts of the people.  The message of the Public Banking in America Conference was that we can throw off the yoke of the financial elite by making money and credit a public utility; and the most feasible place to start is at the local level, with publicly-owned banks.

For videos of some of the speakers see here.  More to come.  The Victoria Grant video has gone viral, approaching half a million hits, including copies.

For those unfamiliar with the American University Corporate Complex, the adjunks are the people with higher degrees: Masters, ABDs, All But Dissertations, (have completed all of their doctoral course work including exams, or referred to secretly as unemployable Doctors in the Humanities), which teach regular university courses as professors do, and most importantly — work for wages that are comparable to prison labor stipends. So why do such people with advanced university degrees do such things?

I too crawled back into such dignity killing adjunk work after receiving my doctorate degree. The reason I sacrificed my self-respect was for starting up my ‘new career’ in welding after receiving a useless six-year doctoral degree in history. I chose a community college that offered a course in the manual arts, where there are still some jobs left under monopoly capitalism, and where the pay is often a lot better than many first year assistant professorships. I mean a starting wage at around 50,000 dollars per year. I thought that I would receive one of my manual arts courses for free if I taught an adjunk course for the community college administrators. Well, this used to be the case in the past, but this time around, I only got a few hundred dollars subtracted from my expensive welding course tuition.

I taught the adjunk course for the community college administrators thinking that it would be easy with little or no supervision. They forced me to use their own pre-made course syllabus and their own pre-ordered course textbook. I ignored both during that semester of teaching, but I was soon harassed on all sides by the administration. When they offered me a course for a later semester in my area of doctoral specialty, I was deeply shocked with the new requirements. The dean told me honestly that I had to cover the over 30 plus ‘course outcomes’ for the class. In my previous educational experience, I had never heard of such state mandated ‘course outcomes’ for a university level course. She printed out the course outcomes for me, and told me that I should look them over.

I looked over the ‘course outcomes’ for about ten minutes and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to rip them up. I actually placed the copies in my personal fraud and scam folder. After reading over those outcomes, it was obvious to me that some state bureaucratic hack had written the course outcomes for an area of study that he or she knew nothing about. The person who wrote them obviously knew nothing about the recent historiography in my field. The many outcome themes related to a bad Social Studies course that they tend to give in American public high schools.

After thinking over such outcomes, I began to shudder. It was obvious that the state community college system did not want any critical thinking or real learning to take place inside of the classroom. Instead, they wanted a pathetic wage slave with no self-respect to teach a bunch of rote crap with lots of useless busy work for the students. I thought: the poor students that have had to sit through such a waste of time — and they had to pay lots of money for this! I rejected the offer to teach such a course, and the course went for the same dismal pay as before: 1,000 dollars for four months of teaching. How did American higher education end up like this?

Most of us have used the American university system as students. I lived in it for many years, until I graduated with my PhD inside of a futile humanities program.  A PhD in history opened my mind to new ways of thinking, and I can do research inside of an archive, but as of yet, there is no job for me. I know that I am not the only one stuck as a PhD with no work, and I also know that a few other PhD holders have ultimately found the long desired tenure track, assistant professor position. The actual problem is not I, nor is it the PhD degree. It is an American academy, or a higher education system that has become another corporate complex inside of the global, monopoly capitalist order.

Important questions are in order: why are so many students in debt and without any means to pay the debts back? Why are so many parents fed up with the added on costs of tuition, when the services at the colleges and universities seem to go down for their sons’ and daughters’ education? Why does tuition and other fees keep rising when the students take longer to graduate?

The answer to all of these questions, and the reason why there are so many unemployable PhDs, is due to the corrupt administrators that run both the private universities and the pseudo, state ‘non-profit’ ones. They have successfully transformed the academic world of the university into one of the shameless scams of the new American economic nightmare. The US university system is now up there with cash checking centers and money stores, Wall St. hustlers, bank card and account user fees, variable rate bank mortgages with little money down, and used car dealership leasing agreements. The disaster of the US academy is neither due to professor teaching costs, nor due to athletic program costs. Rather, look to those administrators’ six figure salaries and full round of benefits.¹

At the university where I graduated from with my PhD, every Saturday night, the president received specially catered meals at his ‘home,’ which the university paid for completely. The president also received the free use of a car with free parking right by his office, a subsidized house paid by the college funds, special box seats with a fully loaded catered table with alcohol at sporting events, and a luxurious office in the oldest and prettiest building on campus. This was only the president. Imagine what his six figure salary assistants received, then the provosts, the assistant provosts, the deans and the assistant deans. Now tally up the salaries and perks of the multiple administrator-director parasites on every American university campus, everything from ‘affirmative action director’ to ‘foreign student services director’ to ‘alcohol and drug abuse director.’

In a political culture that make a fetish out of democracy, the American higher academy is a hierarchy that resembles the Vatican or the Pentagon — and it is even more ‘byzantine’ than the local City Hall. First, there are the ‘trustees’ or in the case of the state entities, ‘regents.’ Then their appointees: chancellors and presidents. The presidents then appoint their assistants and the next group in line, provosts, assistant provosts, and they in turn appoint, deans and assistant deans, and then they in turn appoint the various directors around campus. There’s no democracy there. All of these positions do two things: they delegate, or really hand down, their workloads onto the people below them and they all make good salaries in the six figure range. These positions have continued to grow astronomically at all universities and colleges. In higher education institutions where the main service is educating students, almost none of them teach.²

The administrators are definitely not dumb, however. They are actually the smartest ones on the campuses. During the 1980s when the reaction on university campuses began to mount, administrators, in collusion with state authorities, began to set up the campus police brigades. They ate donuts like other cops — and most importantly, they had the same legal rights as local cops. No more Sixties crap was the hidden code. At first, campus police forces arrested working class, African-American kids and other lower class drifters that ventured onto the well-cut green lawns, or the privileged space of ‘the campus.’ College kids with white skin privilege could still drink underage and smoke their weed in their dorm rooms. But like all methods of gradual repression, and especially in the United States, this would soon change.

Now the police regularly arrest these same paying students for various infractions that are not crimes in most other countries around the world.³ The United States is the only country in the world with such university police forces and that regularly arrest the same paying customers who study there! This method worked so well that now many community colleges have similar cop gangs. And just like the administrators, regular university cops on the beat make six figure salaries with the full round of benefits.⁴

What about the tenured professors? They will make six figure salaries after working for over 20 years in the institution. Unfortunately, they often behave as scared, cowardly and institutionalized drones. The tenure system makes them that way. They have had to walk lightly into such a tight system, so that they never offended anybody in order to receive their tenure security blanket. They have had to obey commands for over twenty years of previously schooling. They are well-trained intellectuals and have transformed themselves into the high managerial class on the campuses. There are very few ‘tenured radicals’ left. The ones that do stay in the system, have to moderate and internally police themselves; i.e., Angela Davis, or they end up fired; i.e., Ward Churchill.

Ward Churchill wasn’t the only one. Think Sami Al-Aran, professor and Palestinian rights activist fired from the University of South Florida before moving into the American gulag, or the professor, Norman Finklestein, ‘denied tenure,’ or politely fired due to his exposure of the Zio-Nazi movement. And there are many others, albeit less known, that have suffered under such a cruel system. At my own university where I received the doctorate curse, a ‘tenured’ professor with an Arabic sounding name publicly exposed the practices of animal cruelty within the university. The university administrators used every overt and covert action to kick him out. Finally, a new president arrived on campus. He simply called in the campus police, and the campus police ordered him to vacate his office immediately.

The American college-university, six figure salary club definitely has its perks – and they can fire and hire at will. The college campus has become their sacred garden of delights.

1. Stripling, Jack and Fuller, Andrea, “Presidents Defend Their Pay as Public Colleges Slash Budgets,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 3, 2011.
2. Gonzalez, Yvonne, ” ASU Calls Goldwater Report Seriously Flawed,” State Press, August 23, 2010.
3. Henderson, Kelli, “Students with unattended tickets could face arrest by campus police,” The Collegian Online, May 17, 2012.
4. Bousquet, Marc, “What UC-Davis Pays for Top Talent,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2001.

“These awards by SSU are reprehensible in light of Sandy Weill’s role in bringing about the economic crisis that has seized this nation,” said SSU sociology professor Noel Byrne. “The consequences have been dire for the SSU community of faculty, staff, students, graduates, alumni and their families, in the form of elevated tuition, reduced funding for education, auctioned homes, dashed dreams, burdensome debts, loss of employment opportunities, and resultant tragedies of an array of sorts.”

“The chaos resulting from the financial meltdown has cost us millions of jobs, throwing probably four to ten million people out of work,” added political science professor John Kramer. “Many folks define their lives, their responsibilities, and their worth to their families and to society by their work. When their work is lost, all too often their lives collapse. Their likelihood of dying in the next year increases. Suicide rates increase. More babies are born underweight and more of them die. We know of suicides here in Sonoma County whose proximate cause is loss of a job. Sandy Weill helped to create this vast tragedy.”

This year’s graduation was a disgrace. When it was announced that the Weills would receive an honorary degree, students, faculty, and alumni began organizing a direct action against that dishonorable degree. Occupy activists and other community members joined them, as did groups such as the Living Wage Coalition and the Peace and Justice Center.

With respect for the hard-working graduating students who earned their degrees, the peaceful action focused on educating the 10,000 students, faculty, family members, and friends who attended the two graduation ceremonies. Thousands of flyers documenting Weill’s substantial abuses as the architect of subprime mortgages and consequential foreclosures and evictions were passed out. Dozens of articles appeared in publications around the region, nationally, and even internationally. Radio stations and a television station reported the action on news and talk shows.

Dressed in black, students, family members, faculty, alumni, and others turned their backs in a dignified shunning when the doctorates were bestowed.

Christopher Bowers graduated on May 12 with a master’s degree in counseling. He turned has back on the Weills and later said, “SSU’s administration has had, for years, an incredible lack of accountability to its faculty, students and the community at large. This protest was for those who have had enough of that kind of cut-throat, dehumanizing culture that SSU continues to perpetuate.”

The last issue of the student newspaper, the May 8 Star, ran the banner “Day of Shame at SSU” across the top of the front-page with an article written by the news editor. The opinion page had two further articles, one entitled “Day of Shame: Wrong Place, Wrong Time” by the editor-in-chief. Those articles, as well as others, are at ShameOnSSU.org.

The newspaper appeared on stands Monday; it was soon taken away. A faculty member wrote the following on the faculty email listserve: “An SSU staff member observed SSU employees removing issues of the Star that had front page information on the controversy regarding the honorary degree process. This is truly disheartening.”

An SSU vice-president admitted, “Some newspapers were removed as part of efforts to clean the campus for graduation — something they do every year. I have directed the Facilities Team to return the papers.”

However, another faculty member reported the following: “I remember there being Star newspapers after nearly every Spring semester I’ve worked here. Some years I’ve been able to grab a copy well into July.” Though copies may have been temporarily returned, they soon vanished again.

“The editor of the Star estimates that 95 percent of newspapers have been removed,” wrote the Star’s faculty advisor. “This is unacceptable and a shot across the bow of the First Amendment. These so-called cleaning efforts that included the Star removal are an affront to free speech. The Day of Shame is now. Is this some attempt to cover up our controversies? I join with those who believe in freedom of speech to ask that a full accounting of what happened to these papers be made.”

Activists describe Weill as a “predator,” given the predatory lending practices that he used while CEO of Citigroup, once the largest bank in the world. A billionaire, he has been on Forbes’ Magazine’s list as one of the 100 most-wealthy Americans.

Weill retired and then spent $31 million dollars to buy a vineyard in Sonoma County in 2010. The wine industry is a primary presence of the 1% in our semi-rural county, which used to have a more diversified food-growing agriculture. It is now a monoculture of alcohol farming and industrial wine production.

As full-time residents in this beloved county, activists do not want other predator bankers and corporate managers to follow and retire with their big bucks and think they can move here without consequences. It is their intention to continue dogging Weill and others who think they can buy public education, join the wine industry, and spend the rest of the lives comfortably spending their ill-gotten wealth.

California’s greatness is due partly to its extensive public higher education, which used to be available here. That system is being privatized and corporatized by the 1% to further meet its elite needs, as these bought doctorates reveal.

One Quebec student organization has come up with four proposals to reduce spending on post-secondary education, so that students are not burdened by rising education costs. Gabrielle Nadeau Dubois, a Quebec student organizer and co-spokesman with CLASSE, calls for a capital tax on Canadian banking transactions, which he proffered would lead gradually to free post-secondary education in Quebec by 2016.

Having set up his system Dühring undertakes to discuss the nature of the “state of the future.” His ideas are, Engels maintains, watered down simplifications of notions he has gleaned from Rousseau and Hegel. In his own words, Dühring bases his state on the “sovereignty of the people.” He explains what he means in the following passage of essentially meaningless mumbo jumbo:

If one presupposes agreements between each individual and every other individual in all directions, and if the object of these agreements is mutual aid against unjust offenses– the the power required for the maintenance of right is only strengthened, and right is not deduced from the more superior strength of the many against the individual or of the majority against the minority.

Don’t worry if that passage doesn’t make any sense as Dühring adds the following to explicate it. He says, “The slightest error in the conception of the role of the collective will would destroy the sovereignty of the individual, and this sovereignty is the only thing conducive to the deduction of real rights.” Engels thinks this pretty “thick” even by the standards of Dühring’s so called “philosophy of reality.”

This is especially so since the “sovereignty of the individual” consists in the fact that he or she is, Dühring says, “Subject to absolute compulsioin by the state.” This is because the state “serves natural justice” and that is the best guarantee of individual sovereignty. There will be a police force for internal security and an army as well — to enforce the will of the state — which is the same as that of the community of sovereign individuals and to ensure people don’t use their sovereignty in an incorrect and un-sovereign manner. And just in case the state makes an error, well, the citizens will still be better off than they would have been if left in the state of nature! Anyway, they will get free lawyers to boot.

Since Dühring says his new state is based on “sober and critical thought”, he announces that religion will be banished from the commune.” In the free society,” he says, “there can be no religious worship; for every member of it has got beyond the primitive childish superstition that there are beings, behind nature or above it, who can be influenced by sacrifices or prayers. [A] socialitarian system, rightly conceived, has therefore … to abolish all the paraphernalia of religious magic, and therewith all the essential elements of religious worship.”

It is important to note, since in the real history of socialism in the twentieth century, some socialist and communist states tried to eliminate religion and religious practices by forceable means, that this idea ["the state has to…"] comes from Dühring, an enemy of the Marxist outlook, and not from anything Marx or Engels had to say. Engels explicitly criticizes this view.

This is not to say Marx and Engels were in any way “soft” on religion ["opium of the masses" and all that] but they respected “individual sovereignty” enough not to dream of using the “state’ [which they wanted to abolish in any case] to trample on people’s rights of conscience in religious affairs.

At this point Engels adds a succinct account of the Marxist view of the origin, social function, and future of religion. It is more or less as follows. Religion is just a reflection in the brains of people of the forces in the external world that are out of their control which affect their lives and that they imagine as supernatural beings which they need to fear and placate. Originally these were the powers of nature that took on the guise of gods and goddess, but as human society progressed and evolved social forces also came to assume these roles. Over time, in the West at least, the many gods and goddess representing these alien powers were distilled down to one god [monotheism; e.g., Jews and Moslems, or three gods posing as one as in the Jewish-pagan synthesis called Christianity- tr] and in this form religion will have a lease on life as long as humans are dominated by natural and social powers they neither understand nor control.

In contemporary capitalist society people are dominated and controlled by an economic system that they have themselves made yet rules over them as if it were an independently existing power beyond their control. The Market– made by humans, rules humans. This is essentially the same reification as is found in religion, and it reinforces religious attitudes and beliefs already historically present in modern society. Engels thinks of this development as the First Act of human development. It is now time for the Second Act.

In the Second Act humans will take control of the means of production and distribution which they have created over the long ages [thereby hangs a tale] and by means of scientific understanding and advance be able to control them rather than being controlled by them. Science will also explain the origins of life, the workings of nature, and the role of humans, leading to advances in medicine, agriculture, education, etc., so that humans will seek to understand the world instead of bowing down before it in stupefaction.

Engels says “only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish: and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.” Dühring can’t wait and wants to administratively abolish religion before humanity has reached the intellectual and social level where it will of its own accord fade away. This will only inflame resistance, antagonize the masses, and strengthen the hold of superstition over the brains of people by giving it “a prolonged lease of life.” I might add, if some of the socialists and communists of the past century, let alone this one, would have taken Engels to heart many mistakes and tragedies could have been avoided.

After Herr Dühring has disposed of religion he tells us that “man, made to rely solely on himself and nature and matured in the knowledge of his collective powers, can intrepidly enter on all the roads which the course of events and his own being open to him.” Fine. Let us see how “man” travels down these roads. First he is born. Then he, or she as the case may be, is under the control of his mother the “natural tutor of children” until puberty (about 14 years) when the role of the father kicks in, as long as “real and uncontested paternity” can be demonstrated. If not a guardian is appointed. Ancient Roman law serves Dühring as a model for these ideas.

This shows, Engels says, that Dühring has no sense of history. The family, for him, is immutable, basically the same in Ancient Rome as in modern capitalism with no allowance for the changes in economic conditions and social relations between the ancient world and contemporary world. Engels then quotes the following passage from Volume One of Das Kapital to show the superiority of Marx’s outlook to Dühring’s. Marx wrote that “modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes [due to the rise of the working class movement capitalism's urge to exploit children in the productive process has been somewhat curtailed-- tr] creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relations between the sexes.”

This new form is still in the process of creation, but there is no going back to the Ancient Roman family, nor even, as our Republican politicians are learning to their chagrin, to the patriarchal family of the Christian Middle Ages — so beloved by the reactionary classes in our country.

Dühring next informs us that “Every dreamer of social reforms naturally has ready a pedagogy corresponding to his new social life.” He may think he is putting others down and himself coming up with a truly scientific plan for the educational needs of society, for the “foreseeable future”, but he is actually a worse dreamer than those he opposes, according to Engels.

In the schools of Dühring’s future cooperative society the children will, Dühring writes, learn “everything which by itself and in principle can have any attraction for man” and so will include “the foundations and main conclusions of all sciences touching on the understanding of the world and of life.” Dühring also tells us he sees in outline all the textbooks of the future but he is personally unable to actually see their contents and just what the children will be learning as that “can only really be expected from the free and enhanced forces of the new social order.” But they will concentrate on physics, math, astronomy and mechanics while biology, botany, and zoology and such will be “topics for light conversation” [!]. He completely forgets to say anything about chemistry. Engels says his knowledge of the sciences seems to be confined to Natural History for Children — a popular book of the 18th Century by Georg Christian Raff (1748-1788).

When it comes to the humanities, Dühring sounds like a second rate Plato. He wants to ban, for example, the great artistic creations of the past because too many of them have religious themes. As Plato banned Homer for portraying the Gods with human flaws, so Goethe is banned by Dühring for “poetic mysticism” and others for any religious content at all — since religion is banned completely in the future state.

American monoglot educators will appreciate Herr Dühring’s attitude to foreign languages. Latin and Greek will be junked entirely — who needs dead languages? Living foreign languages “will remain of secondary importance” and the students will really concentrate on their own native tongue. Engels thinks this is a way to perpetuate the dulling national narrow mindedness of people who are basically ignorant of the world and of the Other. Latin and Greek actually open up people’s minds to a broader perspective of the world and history, at least if they have a classical education, and learning foreign modern languages also allows peoples to have greater understanding of others and their cultures. Dühring’s views are those of the narrow minded Prussian Philistine and similar to the “English only” bigotry found on the right in this country.

Engels gives Dühring credit for at least being aware of the fact there will be a difference between educational policies under socialism and those currently employed in bourgeois society, but since he keeps capitalist relations of production in place in his future communal society he can’t quite figure out what those policies will be. Thus he is reduced to coming up with such ideas as “young and old will work in the serious sense of the word” which, along with other empty phrases, Engels calls “spineless and meaningless ranting.”

Engels counterpoises a brief comment on socialist education from volume one of Das Kapital where Marx says that “from the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown in detail, the germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings.” Our own educational system, which produces dropouts and graduates functional illiterates, is American capitalism’s answer to what education will be in the future.

Finally, after we find out how children will be educated in Dühring’s future society, we find out how they are to come into the world. Dühring, no doubt inspired by Plato’s Republic, tells us that future humans must be “sought in sexual union and selection, and furthermore in the care taken for or against the ensuring of certain results.” We are here on the road to Dühringean eugenics. The most important thing to keep in mind about the future births is not the number but “whether nature or human circumspection succeeded or failed in regard to their quality.” This leads Dühring to conclude that “It is obviously an advantage to prevent the birth of a human being who would only be a defective creature.”

Modern scientific sentiment would not reject this conclusion out of hand, regardless of the feelings of those blinded by religious prejudices or logically challenged. It all depends on the kinds of defects that are presented. Dühring is thinking, however, along lines made popular by Nietzsche, of some sort of super human race compared to the run of the mill humans that unaided Nature tends to produce.

Dühring believes in a human right which may be important, but is not generally appealed to these days, for the purposes of eugenics; i.e., “the right of the unborn world to the best possible composition” [biologically-- tr]. “Conception,” he says, “and, if need be, also birth [infanticide- tr] offer the opportunity , or in exceptional cases selective, care in this connection.” Dühring is not just talking about medical defects– but also “aesthetic” defects.

He thinks, in fact, that people should be bred to look like the ancient Greeks! “Grecian art — the idealization of man in marble [not "European" man but "man"]– will not be able to retain its historical importance when the less artistic, and therefore from the standpoint of the fate of the millions, far more important task of perfecting the human form in flesh and blood is taken in hand.” OK, so we won’t all look like Antinous or the Venus de Milo but that goal will be a work in progress for the future Dühringean society.

How does Dühring bring about the this perfection of the human [ancient Greeks-- Dühring had no use for modern Greeks] form? Well, he says force would be harmful but it will come about as a natural result of the mating of beautiful people– sort of by an “invisible hand” (but in this case a different anatomical feature will be at work). Here is Dühring’s quote: [From the] “higher, genuinely human motives of wholesome sexual unions … the humanly ennobled form of sexual excitement , which in its intense manifestations is passionate love, when reciprocated is the best guarantee of a union which will be acceptable also in its result…. It is only an effect of the second order that from a relation which in itself is harmonious a symphoniously composed product should result.”

Engels thinks Dühring’s views on sex are “twaddle.” This is because force would have to be used to make sure all unions were “wholesome” by Dühring’s standards. In the real world it is not just the beautiful people who fall in love and have children (symphoniously composed products) but all kinds of people so “the second order” effects of lovemaking would be the same in the future communal state of Herr Dühring as they are now. [He could, however, try for a rigged lottery a la Plato's Republic to match up the "best" people and only allow those with baby licenses to reproduce. This would lead to more problems than the Chinese have had with the one child policy -- which was successful in limiting population numbers but a failure from the point of view of creating balanced population growth.]

Engels also critiques Dühring’s “noble ideas about the female sex in general”[prostitution is a normal activity due to the constraints of bourgeois marriage]– but both Dühring’s ideas and Engel’s response are too shaped by nineteenth century conditions to be applicable to twenty-first century advanced industrial societies so I will pass this topic by and come to the conclusion of Anti-Dühring.

After having gone over all the major views that Dühring had presented in a series of writings over the years, and refuting them by giving a proper Marxist response to his mixed up theoretical constructions, Engels sums up Dühring’s oeuvre as being the product of mental incompetence due to megalomania.

Postscript: Eugen Dühring survived Engel’s critique and wrote more books and articles. In the 1880′s he began turning out anti-Semitic writings some of which led Theodor Hertzel to conclude that the Jews needed their own state. Frederick Nietzsche’s rantings against socialism were the result of his having read Dühring’s works not those of Marx and Engels (although I doubt it would have made any difference). Of his many books only one has been translated into English — his anti-Semitic tract on the Jewish question was published in 1997 as Eugen Dühring on the Jews by 1984 Press. Dühring died in 1921 thus being deprived of seeing the fruits of his anti-Semitic labors. These and other interesting facts about Dühring are to be found in the Wikipedia article “Eugen Dühring.”

Sanford (Sandy) Weill was the driving force in shattering the Glass-Steagall Act, which for decades had prohibited Wall Street investment firms from gambling with their depositors’ money. Its reversal opened the gates for the housing crisis in 2008, the plague of foreclosures devastating our communities and the economic recession that has stolen our children’s future. Mr. Weill thus enabled the merger that created Citigroup, a major player in the criminal banking practices thereby unleashed. Given his unquestioned responsibility in this, Time Magazine recently included Weill’s name in its list of the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”

A major purveyor of toxic subprime mortgages, Citigroup required $45 billion in government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets to avoid bankruptcy; yet Sandy Weill retired an incredibly wealthy man shortly before the “banking collapse he helped engineer” required a tax-payer bail-out. Now Mr. Weill is being rewarded with a degree in Humane Letters for his donation of 12 million of his ill-gotten dollars to complete SSU’s construction of the controversial Green Musical Center. SSU Sociology Professor Peter Phillips asks, “Is this a doctorate honoring anything besides being the largest recent donor to the Green Music Center? It seems to smack of buying the honor instead of earning it.”

In fact, many of the students in the SSU graduating class this year are leaving school saddled with Citigroup student loans, all part of the trillion dollar student loan debt from which graduates across the nation will be struggling for years to escape. The courageous obligation to protest Weill’s honorary degree is made quite clear in graduating SSU student Melanie Sanders’ words: “I must now call my grandma and explain that I will be protesting at my graduation ceremony. I am personally offended that he will be at my graduation and receiving a degree.”

Many attribute this offensive gesture to the stewardship of SSU President Ruben Armiñana. They argue that, by honoring a man who, in the process of amassing his fortune, has inflicted so much suffering and destruction on countless lives – including many in this very graduating class – Armiñana has betrayed the integrity of the California State University system and its mission. The Day of Shame on Sonoma State University is an urgent action organized to give people an opportunity to demonstrate their outrage and publicly denounce the arrogance, greed and fraud that has inverted our social contract and hi-jacked the American Dream as the entitlement of the few, at the expense of the many.

According to organizer Shepherd Bliss, “Seating for 4,000 guests will be set up to accommodate those wanting to be present for 1000 graduates in the morning and another 1000 in the afternoon. This would be an important audience to educate and mobilize, helping them connect the necessary dots between a prominent one percenter and his victims.”

The “Day of Shame on Sonoma State University” starts at noon on the SSU campus at 1801 East Cotati Ave, Rohnert Park, on May 12, 2012. Please respect our commitment to non-violent assembly and protect the integrity of this graduation ceremony, deploying your creativity to inform and articulate compassionate resistance, and honoring the dignity of this treasured moment for students and their families by dressing appropriately in black.

Clearly, thinking outside the box is not how our system deals with serious issues.  When having lunch with fellow educators and arguing about the crimes, especially against the Constitution and on war,  of both the Bush and Obama administrations, my frustration is palpable.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the Republicans enjoy being in the box whereas the Democrats don’t even know they’re in one.

On issues of war and economics, the Republicans and many Democrats I talk with clearly support the idea  that the US is a world economic power and needs to maintain it in any way they can.  They might acknowledge the wrongs committed but see it as necessary.  OK, that’s where dialog comes in.  My partisan Democratic friends, especially in the teachers’ lounge of my school, are simply oblivious to the wrongs or come up with every conceivable way of minimizing it or laying blame elsewhere. The most common response to the economic disaster that we’re in due to Obama’s Wall Street cabinet is that the Republicans won’t let him do what needs to be done. Another gem is that in politics you can’t always get what you campaign on and its corollary, the political climate is not ripe for what you’re asking.

Bush controlled the Congress. Obama is certainly the antithesis. He punted every major decision to them. Whether it be health care or Don’t Ask, President Obama relinquished the bully pulpit for the collaborative approach of having the other arm of government have a role, but in most cases, the only role.  If only President Obama, when he was elected with an American-style mandate, and with a Democrat-controlled Congress, were to have rallied the pro-Single Payer (Medicare for All) populous, a majority of Americans, for universal health care, it would have passed over both Democratic and Republican opponents in Congress.  He simply could have equated the health insurance industry with the likes of Al Qaeda.  Who would have had kind words for, or dare to come out and defend, the insurance industry? If not Single Payer, then at a minimum, a public option would be the law today, paving the way for universal coverage.  But President Obama preferred the box that we’re in. Yes, I’m implying that he falls within the Republican view of the box theory since he earlier sided with the industry by giving them what they wanted, and no public option, as long as they didn’t pull a Harry and Louise on him.

Missing in the dialog is acknowledgment of reality.  “No we’re not in a Police State because we’re not living like under Nazi Germany.”  True, unless you’re an undocumented alien or whistle blower- military or civilian-, where you’ll be tonight or tomorrow is likely known.  The drone war, supported by a majority of ‘progressives’ in America, is just a way of achieving a military solution without requiring the presence of American boots on the ground.  Rachel Maddow’s all for it so it must be the progressive thing to do when it’s done by a Democrat in the White House.  “Why make a case of habeas corpus?  Abraham Lincoln suspended it and thank God for him. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”

What is the ‘box’?: the capitalist economy. With it comes imperial wars for others’ natural resources (Why is our oil under their sand?); support for military coups against democratically elected governments (Honduras and the Maldives); support for apartheid regimes and theocracies in the Middle East yet mouthing praise for the Arab Spring, as long as it’s in the ‘right’ countries; wages far below needs; reform of health insurance but not health care reform; homelessness and foreclosures when vacant houses, owned by banks and local governments, sit idle; public education under severe attack by both Democrats and Republicans who want to privatize it, bust the unions, and, of course, blame the teachers for not increasing test scores that have no baring of the real learning that is taking place; for-profit prison population booming (especially for the undocumented being prepared for deportation); etc.

Electoral reform is certainly needed to remove the box of capitalism from discussions on solving our problems. As it stands, it is virtually impossible for a variety of Third Parties to have ballot access in every state. There’s too much of a fear that it would cause the demise, in particular, of the Democratic Party. After all, if their platform isn’t marketable and another’s is, then they would go the way of Betamax.  The Republicans can stay as the legitimate 1% Party; the Democrats would do best to merge with them. How can we have electoral reform when states like Virginia require a 10,000-signature petition (not terribly difficult, but onerous) yet require a minimum of 400 in each county? Can you imagine that many supporting a Socialist party in Pat Robertson’s neck of the woods?

Dialog on issues can work as long as there is a recognition of reality and ownership of responsibility for why things are as they are. Without it,  it’s status quo.  Your everyday, typical Republican, on matters of war and economics, needs to see how the system is not working for them, except for those in a minority that it does.  Democratic partisans and Obama die-hard supporters need to truly question their values and principles and objectively see if their party truly stands by it, or equivocates to the point of non-recognition of the principles.  Maybe easier said  than done but the box remains strong, or invisible, as long as thinking remains stagnant.

Sure, that might be the mantra for the New Faculty Majority, but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/contingent/temporary/migratory/irregular/at-will/auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

At one school where I recently taught, Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington, the battle for the minds and hearts of students is fought with almost 70 percent of the faculty hitched to the quasi-indentured servitude label, “adjunct.”

My fellow colleague, philosophy adjunct Keith Hoeller, lives a typical story of teaching 20 years at 10 colleges to cobble together a living. “The use of adjunct faculty is higher education’s way of outsourcing,” he recently said.

For this Puget Sound region, all 3.3 million of us, the April 20 teach-in – “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” – was somewhat historic, so says several faculty involved in the break-away group of adjunct instructors organizing this event. A few of the GRAFA members – Green River Adjunct Faculty Association – have been teaching at GRCC for more than two decades each.

The two speakers both had global and localized perspectives on adjuncts – Frank Cosco with Vancouver Community College Faculty Association and Jack Longmate, Olympic College English instructor who is at the center of a battle with both the college and faculty union on moonlighting and academic freedom and retaliation.¹

Both are the authors of “Program for Change, 2010-2030,” a manifesto festooned to the New Faculty Movement’s impetus to activate adjuncts around the North America, Mexico and other countries, to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, since the new majority is part-time and non-tenure track faculty:

The dysfunctional state of faculty employment in post-secondary education in 2010 is well documented and well known. Over the last few decades, corporatization has fragmented faculty. It has resulted in a caste-like structure with primarily two tiers. The majority of the faculty occupies the lower tier and is recognized as performing only a portion of the job, classroom instruction; these faculty tend to be compensated at a rate of pay in violation of the principle of ―equal pay for equal work, often resulting in a poverty-level income. They work in complete insecurity. They are left to draw upon the satisfaction of working with students as their chief inspiration to continue because of their dismal working conditions and the equally dismal prospects for improvement.

Cosco is a full-time VCC faculty member in ESOL and has worked with normalizing adjuncts since the 1980s. He’s also been a key official with the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL). This GRCC teach-in was made up of students, adjuncts and full-time faculty – and three faculty union folk, two TT and one PT.

We filmed it for You Tube distribution.

Union-led and Unionist-Thinking, and Proud of It.

It was clear early on in the teach-in that the Vancouver, BC, model is the pie in the sky for many US adjuncts who cannot imagine what VCC has gained through hard-fought union collective bargaining. Frank Cosco is pugnacious, diplomatic and a man with a mission – “The very point of a union and our duty as a faculty union is to fight for those who are the least able to speak, the most vulnerable. It’s about creating one community of faculty, so when one group is disregarded, the union leadership has to fight for their inclusion.”

So, “the weakest and most vulnerable,” non-tenured, have gained equal pay for equal work, and more:

• salary and workload equity, to include immediate pay scale; pay for vacation and holidays
• paid professional development days
• hiring equity and reappointment rights, to include one hiring process per career and right to seniority reappointment after six months
• evaluation transparency, to include strong grievance procedures
• conversion right from term faculty to regular faculty, to include automatic regularization of the person, not the position
• college health and pension benefits
• seniority rights, pro-rated
• maternity leave that doesn’t disadvantage faculty
• right to participate equally in union and professional matters
• and more.

The US national percentage of “adjuncts” teaching in all institutions of higher education, including private colleges, state universities, community/technical colleges, as well as for profits and on-line schools, is reaching the 8 out 10 mark. Twenty percent of faculty now are tenure track workers.

In Washington State, just counting the 34 community and technical colleges, 46 percent of all state-supported instruction is taught by adjuncts. I think of it this way: 8,059 PT to 3,598 FT (2010, SBCTC).

Castes, Untouchables/Two tiers, Two lives

It gets worse., according to Pablo Eisenberg, senior fellow at Georgetown Policy Institute in his piece, “The ‘Untouchables’ of Higher Education.”² :

American universities and colleges are riddled with a caste system that violates our societal sense of fairness, justice, and decency. Neither the general public, nor parents, nor the large majority of students are even aware of its existence. College administrators and tenured faculty, who are acutely aware of the system, have done little or nothing to remedy the problem. It is a festering sore that threatens not only the quality of higher education but the system’s ability to recruit and retain good teachers.

Here we are, now, with a caste system, viewed as untouchables, and, for many, we are considered disposable people. Right now, more than 540,000 adjuncts fill the rosters of part-time faculties, and another 240,000 are full-time, off tenure track who are quarterly or semester by semester hired as full time, or maybe with a yearly contract.

Full-loads, Freeway Flying, One-third the Pay

I’ve taught a full load at one institution, Spokane Falls Community College, with some other college duties funded through soft money (memos of understanding). My sum total for that couple of years? Less than 50 percent of what a full-timer would have been paid. I worked on campus-wide curriculum development, served on two committees, headed up the college’s sustainability efforts, and organized one year-long series of highly public events tied to climate change and helped organize a themed year event. Oh yeah, I advised the general population of students and served as the Earth Club faculty coordinator.

Why? I love students, I love working with new focuses in cross-disciplinary communications, and I love being fully engaged in political-public-private-non-profit connections to our community colleges. Part of that motivation, too, was to try and work just at one college campus while pulling down around $28,000. The other projects I worked on included a weekly hour public affairs community radio show where I interviewed such people at Bill McKibben, David Suzuki, Naomi Wolf, Amy Goodman, authors, poets, social justice advocates and dozens of actors in the climate change and sustainability arena. Then there was a paid column in the weekly alternative newspaper. Finally, I ended up working with several City- and County-wide task forces looking at Spokane’s educational needs tied to the high dropout rate. Add to that a writer in the schools gig and my advisory role status with the large literary event, Get Lit!, part of Eastern Washington University’s week-long writing festival.

The reason for inserting this brief narrative for several of my total 10 years in Spokane is that my work was part of the larger frame of why adjuncts are more than just interchangeable, underclass workers that “help” the bottom line needs of colleges to be flexible when enrollments swell or contract: we’re professionals who in the current culture of education are whipping posts for such things as the falling achievement and performance gaps, as well as the threat against tenure.

Where I went and worked outside the college, everyone knew my college association.

Forget the fact that adjuncts publish, research, carry through with massive amounts of continuing education, present at conferences, and go onto completing other graduate degrees.

It’s the economy, stupid could be replaced with, It’s the fragmentation thing. In the eyes of by the privatizers who seem to be the soldiers of the vulture and parasitic capitalists who are emboldened by a divide and conquer program pitting TT faculty against PT faculty.

For now, the goals of adjuncts and graduate students tie into developing distinct and sometimes separate union issues since Full-time Tenure Track folk supervise us, determine how many classes we get, and where and when. It’s obvious the huge faculty unions have failed at defending this attack on higher education and failed to stop the evisceration of the collective bargaining movement. The administrations are swelling their ranks, and as a cost saver, ramping up cheap-rate and insecure jobs.

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work” as Ulrich Beck illustrates it in his book, The Brave New World of Work (Polity Press, 2000).

1. See Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2012, “Adjunct Challenges College’s Accreditation Over Alleged Failure to Stop Union Retaliation” by Peter Schmidt.
2. Huffington Post, 29 June, 2010.
3. See Activism through Art and 2255 Films.

Once I had gotten past the Prologue – which I thought did not belong at the beginning of the book – Khan’s narrative never lost its power to sustain my interest. The book takes the reader through many unexpected shifts in the protagonist’s life – from cricket to charity work, from charity work to politics, from the life of a celebrity to a life of piety, from disdain for Islam to a deepening respect for its richness and depth, from contempt (a colonial legacy common to Pakistan’s elites) for ordinary Pakistanis to a growing concern for their tormented lives, from wilting shyness before audiences to a determination to face the glare of public life, from growing anxiety about Pakistan’s problems to an unshakable resolve to do something about them; etc. In short, the book takes the reader through the life of an extraordinary man, at first fully immersed in the privileges of his class and his cricket celebrity but slowly turning inwards, questioning the colonial mindset of his own privileged class, angry at the limitless corruption of Pakistan’s rulers, and, finally, reaching resolution in his commitment to take Pakistan back from its corrupt elites. A politician with Imran Khan’s record would be rare in Western ‘democracies.’ In a country like Pakistan, mired for decades in the corruption of rapacious elites, he is an anomaly – an outlier. Should the Pakistanis embrace Imran Khan, should they give him the chance to pick and lead the nation’s political team, this could be a game-changer for their country.

While describing his spiritual journey following the pain of his mother’s death, Imran Khan sums up his life in an aphorism, “A spiritual person takes responsibility for society, whereas a materialist only takes responsibility for himself (87).” Quite apart from the truth-value of this statement (since a ‘materialist’ or someone without belief in God or afterlife may also choose to take responsibility for society), this sentiment very aptly describes the author’s long and tortuous passage from indifference towards larger questions – both metaphysical and political – to a deepening engagement with God and the history and fate of Pakistanis and Muslims. In time, after much soul-searching, Imran Khan chooses to take “responsibility for society.” Once he has formed a conviction, Imran Khan has shown that there is no turning back for him.

Imran Khan’s autobiography contains some homespun theology too. At one point, he describes how cricket nudged him towards faith; it began with observations on cricketing luck. A game can turn on the toss of a coin; success in bowling can depend on the way the ball is stitched, on umpiring mistakes, on fortuitous injuries, on the weather, etc. In other words, “there seemed to be a zone beyond which players were helpless, and it was called luck (84).” He muses, “… could what we call luck actually be the will of God?” Is it possible, amidst the infinite complexity that produces any outcome, that God intervenes in our lives, nudges a particle here a particle there to confront us with outcomes that surprise us, overthrow our certainties, deflate our egos, forcing us to think of higher forces?

After his mother’s painful death from cancer, Imran Khan turned away from God. Questions of theodicy troubled him. He worried that his life’s accomplishments could vanish in a moment. In the face of this vulnerability, persuaded by a logic that recalls Pascal’s wager, he resumed his salaat. “This was really like an insurance policy – a sort of safety net in case God really did exist.” It is likely that Imran had arrived at his reasoning on his own, or he had encountered this argument in the Qur’an. Unknown to most Muslims, the Qur’an makes this argument on several occasions; it is then taken up by Hazrat Ali, the Prophet’s cousin, and in the eleventh century by al-Ghazzali.

Imran Khan speaks reverently of the influence of Mian Bashir on his life, an obscure but spiritually gifted man who gently led him to discover the inwardness and beauty of Islam. People who have lost touch with metaphysics will likely frown at this influence. Untroubled by such skeptics, Imran Khan recognizes this obscure sufi as the “single most powerful spiritual influence” on his life. I respect this openness to the Unseen, this divinely implanted ‘naiveté’ – if you will – that lies at the heart of all authentic religious experience, and that Western rationalism and scientism have nearly destroyed in modern man. Despite the materialism that assails us, we can stay in touch with this ‘naiveté.’ In better times too, very few men and women could reach the summits of the mystical ascent; but they sought spiritual sustenance in the baraka of the valis, friends of God. Unknown to Pakistan’s militant secularists, Asadullah Khan Ghalib too – despite his celebrated skepticism – sought intimacy with God through veneration of Hazrat ‘Ali and his family.

2.

Imran Khan is nothing if not resolute in pursuing the goals he sets for himself; and his goals have never been modest. “Over the years,” he writes, “I came to the conclusion that ‘genius’ is being obsessed with what you are doing (63).” Quite early in his cricket career, spurred by the example of Dennis Lillee, he decided to remake himself as a fast bowler. His teammates and coach warned him that he “had neither the physique nor the bowling action to become a fast bowler (118)” and he could ruin his career if he tried to change his bowling style. Imran Khan was not deterred. He remodeled his “bowling action to become a fast bowler,” and as he worked hard towards this goal – he writes – “my body also became stronger for me to bowl fast.” Most cricket commentators agree that Imran Khan went on to establish himself as one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time. Fewer still have combined his eminence in fast bowling with skill at batting and leading his team.

When Imran Khan set out in 1984 to establish Pakistan’s first cancer hospital – he ran into a wall of skepticism. When he presented his plans for the Hospital to the leading Pakistani doctors in Lahore and Lon-don, they were dismissive; he did not give up. Working indefatigably to collect mostly small donations from tens of thousands of people at home and abroad, Imran Khan began construction work on the project in April 1991. The Hospital admitted its first patients in December 1994, with a com-mitment to provide free care to all poor patients. Skeptics had warned that this policy was not viable, but generous Pakistanis proved them wrong. Now plans are underway for building two more cancer hospitals in Peshawar and Karachi.

Our author has shown the same dogged persistence in the arena of politics. When he announced his entry into politics in 1996 – with the for-mation of a new party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, dedicated to fighting corrup-tion in public life – Pakistanis ignored him. In the first elections it contested in 1997, the Tehreek won no seat; in the second election in 2002, it won a single seat. Imran Khan could draw large crowds to his rallies, but they were drawn to their cricket hero not the political leader who promised to deliver a better future for them. Perhaps, Imran Khan had not done his homework. His promise to fight corruption did not yet carry a broad appeal; his message did not resonate with workers, peasants, students, clerks and small shop-keepers. Pakistanis knew that their leaders are corrupt, but they did not see Imran Khan as the force that could pry Pakistan out of their dirty but powerful grip. Imran Khan had not begun the hard work of building his party from the ground up, creating a cadre of committed workers and donors. He spent too much time on talk shows and too little time organizing his party.

The failure of Tehreek-e-Insaaf to make an impact in the 2002 elections may well have ended Imran Khan’s political career; but he was not ready to quit the field. He persisted in his attacks on Pakistan’s corrupt elites through regular appearances on television talk shows that had proliferated following General Musharraf’s liberalization of the media. Then came the attacks of 9-11, the US decision to draft Pakistan into its so-called Global War Against Terror. Gleefully, Pakistan’s generals accepted every demand that the US made on Pakistan’s sovereignty; they gave the US air and land corridors to Afghanistan, control of one or more airbases in Pakistan, and free run of Pakistan to CIA operatives. Only the religious parties and jihadi factions opposed this surrender of Pakistan’s sovereignty, but they occupied limited political space in Pakistan. With few exceptions, Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ intellectuals also supported the US War; they were happy to see the Taliban driven out by the American invaders. The political tides were begging to turn for Imran Khan. This was his opportunity to broaden his critique of Pakistan’s corrupt political classes; their corruption now veered towards treason. None of this was surprising, but it did bring out into the open Pakistan’s descent to the depths of servitude.

As events unfolded, the charge of treason would gain greater plausibility. General Musharraf’s government kept the Americans happy by killing the Taliban who had sought refuge in Pakistan; others were captured and handed over to the Americans. In open violation of Pakistan’s constitution, the government also began to disappear Pakistanis who were then secretly transferred to the Americans. Pakistan’s involvement in America’s war entered a new phase in 2004 as the CIA mounted its first drone strikes on Pakistani territory. On American demand, the generals also directed the Pakistani military to attack Taliban sanctuaries in Waziristan. Pakistan’s political classes had now privatized the army. Pakistani soldiers now killed the Taliban and Pakistanis to enrich the country’s political elites.

While the generals collected cash from the US, Pakistanis would pay the price for this treason. Pakistan’s war against the Taliban and their Pashtun hosts produced a frightening backlash that has continued to grow. The logic of this backlash was simple, as Imran Khan also explains. No doubt encouraged by the Afghan Taliban, the families of the Pashtun victims – calling themselves the Pakistani Taliban – mounted devastating retaliatory attacks against military and civilian targets in Pakistan, but mostly against the latter. There was no change in Pakistan’s commitment to America’s war when a civilian government, led corrupt politicians rehabilitated under a deal hatched in Washington, replaced General Musharraf in 2008. While Pakistan’s liberal and left intellectuals wanted the government to exterminate the Pakistani Taliban; they insisted that the Pakistani Taliban was an Islamic fundamentalist movement to take power in Pakistan and had nothing to do with the war Pakistani military had unleashed against the Pashtuns. Imran made the opposite argument. Terminate the war against the Pashtuns and Afghans, and the Pakistani Taliban would cease their attacks; they would disappear as quickly as they had appeared.

After a long delay, Imran Khan’s strategy began to pay off. As Pakistan escalated the war against its own people in two of its four provinces, as Paki-stani capital fled and foreign capital shunned the country, as the economy worsened, as poverty deepened, as political factions in Karachi engaged in bloody turf battles, as power outages persisted, as supply of cooking gas be-come intermittent, the anger and desperation of Pakistanis also grew. Who could lift Pakistan from this descent into chaos? Pakistanis knew better than to expect a savior to emerge from the military or the established political classes: for they had produced the mayhem and were its chief beneficiaries. In this gloom, Imran Khan beckoned to Pakistanis. His calls for justice grew louder, his jeremiads against corrupt politicians became sharper, his critique of the generals became unsparing. Slowly, his message began to resonate with Pakistani youth and the urban middle classes in Pakistan. Starting in mid-2011, the polls signaled a surge in his popularity.

On October 30 2011, Imran Khan was ready to take a measure of his popularity with a rally in Lahore. The rally was a great success; more than two hundred thousand people showed up. Most people agreed that nothing like this had been seen since the days of the charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. On December 25, the Tehreek organized a second rally in Karachi, the stronghold of a local ethnic party, with the same results. Finally, some sixteen years after his entry into politics, people were beginning to rally around Imran Khan and his party. This surge in his popularity suddenly changed the political map of Pakistan. It also produced some unwelcome results; now that his prospects looked brighter, some members of the established political class began to knock on the Tehreek’s door. Imran Khan was now a political force; after wandering for many years on the margins, he had arrived with a bang on Pakistan’s political scene.

Imran Khan offered a more optimistic assessment of his prospects. He described the surge in his popularity as a political tsunami that would in time sweep out the old corrupt order. Was this a case of excessive self-congratulation? This would depend on whether the Tehreek could sustain the momentum it had generated, whether it could capitalize on this surge to build a grassroots organization, whether it could expand its program to incorporate the interests of workers and peasants, and whether it could create an intellectual cadre that would disseminate its message through print, television and the internet. Can Imran Khan energize the people, raise their hopes of change to a fever pitch, so that attempts to defeat them by extra-legal means could backfire and persuade the Tehreek to lead an uprising? I will return to these questions; but first, I wish to turn to the increasingly shrill and frenzied attacks against Imran Khan by Pakistan’s putative liberal and left-leaning intelligentsia; these attacks are most visible in the English-language print media. Their shrill commentary suggests that they are beginning to take him seriously.

3.

Pakistan’s ‘liberal’ and ‘left-leaning’ groups bring three related charges against Imran Khan: he is an Islamist (or fundamentalist), a partisan of the Taliban, and a rightist. They rely on less than half-truths in making their case.

Imran Khan is certainly Islamic in his thinking, inspiration and identity but he is not an Islamist, a term that generally applies to Muslims who subscribe to a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and the Traditions of the Prophet. Unlike many Pakistanis who identify themselves as liberals or leftists – and take a Kemalist view of Islam as a backward religion that must be rigorously excluded from the public discourse and even public space – Imran Khan derives his identity from Islam and seeks inspiration in the Qur’an and the Traditions. In regards to the relevance of some of the legal aspects of the Qur’an, together with Allama Iqbal and Fazlur Rahman (for many years, a professor of Islamic Studies at University of Chicago), he recognizes the need for revisiting some of the rulings that were given currency by the consensus of a previous age. In this sense, it would be appropriate to describe Imran Khan as an Islamic modernist; but unlike most Islamic modernists he also feels a strong affinity for the sufi tradition of Islam that has emphasized the spirit and inward content religion without neglecting its outward practice. In both respects, I doubt if there are Islamists who would admit Imran Khan into their inner circles.

Is Imran Khan then a partisan of the Taliban? The United States has used its hegemonic control over mainstream global discourse – especially since launching its global military offensive under the cover of the Global War Against Terror – to smear all freedom fighters it does not support as terrorists. The discourse on terrorism is very cleverly designed to focus the world’s attention on the relatively insignificant acts of violence by oppressed peoples and thereby legitimize the massive acts of violence perpetrated by Western nations against the rest of the world. In American demonology, anyone fighting against the US occupation of Afghanistan is a terrorist – whether he is Afghan or Pakistani. Most ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ writers in Pakistan have internalized this American rhetoric; it follows that the Afghans and Pakistanis fighting the US occupation do not have a legitimate cause regardless of what fighting tactics they employ. In describing Imran Khan as Taliban sympathizer, then, these writers hope to smear him as a terrorist-sympathizer. This smear will not stick. Most Pakistanis recognize that Imran Khan supports the right of Afghans to rid their country of US occupation; other than that and his ethnic kinship with the Pashtuns, there can exist little affinity between him and the Afghan Taliban.

It is time now to explain the scare quotes surrounding the political labels left, right and liberal. In much of the Islamicate, politics has moved into strangely dubious territory, where these labels retain very little of their original meaning. As the liberal or left-oriented political elites in much of the Islamicate began to lose their legitimacy starting the 1970s – because of their dismal failure to create free, sovereign and prosperous polities – and faced growing opposition from various Islamist movements, they chose to sacrifice their ideology in order to cling to power. They had risen to power on an anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and, in some cases, socialist platform. Starting in the 1970s, the survival of the increasingly repressive regimes they led was tied to the support of Western powers in return for keeping the Islamists out of power; this was the pact they made with the devil. It was an enduring pact that crushed any opposition to these regimes until the recent Arab uprising. The liberal and left factions in Pakistan also reprogrammed themselves after the end of the Cold War. Under Benazir Bhutto, the Pakistan People’s Party, once left-leaning, anti-imperialist, sought legitimacy in Washington and quickly embraced its neoliberal program to open the economy to Western capital.

If the formerly liberal and left leaning forces completed this metamorphosis with little difficulty, this is not entirely surprising. Even when they proclaimed socialist ideals or employed anti-imperialist rhetoric, the thinking of the politically dominant classes in much of the Islamicate had been shaped by an Orientalist narrative. After the Western powers had destroyed or marginalized the traditional learned classes – judges and jurisprudents trained in Shariah, theologians, physicians, engineers, architects and artists – this created space for the emergence of new intellectual classes that were beholden to their colonial masters. More often than not, they were secular and nationalist in their politics, and, following their Orientalist mentors, they blamed Islam for their backwardness; as a result, even when they paid lip service to Islam, they were determined to exclude it from their political discourse. In keeping with their colonialist thinking, they affected Western styles and mannerisms but did little to acquire the institutions, sciences and technology that were the motors of Western power and prosperity. It is no exaggeration to assert that these new elites – despite their nationalist rhetoric – felt closer to their colonial masters they had replaced than to the people they claimed to lead.

In consequence, as Islamist opposition movements began to reject their claims to leadership, the failed political elites retreated into the arms of their former colonial masters. They sought to convince the Western world that they faced a common enemy; the Islamist parties eager to replace them would turn the clock back on human rights, women’s rights and the rights of minorities. Worse, should the Islamist opposition gain power they would pursue policies openly hostile to Western interests. Despite the about-turn in their policies, however, these elites continued to sport their old political labels. They were ‘nationalists’ but owed their survival to Western arms, money, diplomatic support, intelligence, and advice. They were ‘liberals’ but they were happy to use the police state to suppress opposition to their regimes. They were ‘socialists’ but eagerly embraced the neoliberal dictates of the IMF and the World Bank.

In Pakistan, different factions of the ruling elites – who variously claim to be ‘nationalists,’ ‘liberals’ or ‘leftists’ – strenuously lobby the Americans or the British to gain power or to keep it. They outbid each other in sacrificing vital national interests; they never tire of proclaiming that the nation’s economic salvation depends on attracting foreign investment; they have backed unconditionally America’s so-called war on terrorism; they oppose the Afghans’ right to free their country of foreign occupiers; they cheered when General Musharraf used Pakistan’s military to fight Pakistanis who aided the Afghans; they privately assure the Americans that – despite their public stance – they stand firmly behind the deadly drone strikes against ‘targets’ inside Pakistan. Disregarding Pakistan’s Islamic sensibilities, a tiny minority of ‘secularists’ in Pakistan want to impose Western sexual mores on Pakistan; they have campaigned to abrogate the nation’s laws against blasphemy, not prevent its abuse or mitigate its penalties; they refuse to defend the rights of Muslim minorities in Western countries; they support America’s demands to shut down the madrasas in Pakistan but have long supported a colonial system of education for the elites that uses syllabi and exams designed in Cambridge.

Indeed, recently, one columnist at Dawn – a leading English newspaper – lampooned Imran Khan for refusing to share the podium with Salman Rushdie at a literary event in India. I do not know what inner demons drove Rushdie to produce his obscene caricature of Islam, but it does seem odd that a writer – that any person with imagination – would seek to sully and shatter a sacred treasure of humanity only because he finds himself excluded from its deep mystery. Needless to say, I did not support Ayatollah Khomenei’s call for Rushdie’s assassination; nor do I support the death penalty for apostasy. Islam supports free choice in matters of conscience, but the state may limit the activities of well-funded foreign missionaries that use pecuniary inducements to gain converts.

4.

Imran Khan has a great deal to say about the canker of Pakistan’s colonial legacy; the cultural divide that separates the class of brown sahibs and the great mass of Pakistanis who remain anchored in their history and traditions; and the new American masters this class has served since the departure of the British.

He also writes about his own struggles to overcome the Orientalist culture into which he was born, the culture of the brown sahibs, their sneering contempt for Islam, their denigration of the ‘natives’ and their culture. He describes his long and distinguished career in cricket that reveals a perfectionist and a man undaunted by failures. He shares with the readers his personal discovery of God, about growing spiritually through his own struggles in cricket and his charity work; finding inspiration in Islam’s great thinkers, poets and sages – most of all the great Islamic poet, visionary and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal – but also seeking the blessings of nameless sufis, who prefer to live in obscurity and poverty despite their spiritual gifts. This review can only look at some of these issues; to accompany Imran Khan on his life journey, to walk through the many stages of his life, to explore his personal narrative of Pakistan’s political failures you have to read his Pakistan: A Personal History.

Quite rightly, Imran Khan blames the brown sahibs – a few thousand of the most powerful military officers, bureaucrats, and influential landed families – for never giving Pakistan the chance to develop into a self-respecting, sovereign and prosperous country. This class had retained or acquired its social rank, wealth and power during the colonial era by rendering loyal service to the British rulers; demonstrating their servility to their foreign masters by adopting their dress, mimicking their life style and mannerisms, and gaining familiarity with the history of British royalty, British place names, and British writers. They turned to jaundiced Orientalists for their knowledge of Islam, the history of Muslims and of India; and from them they acquired their deep contempt for Islam, the Muslims and their languages and traditions. Like their British masters, they interacted with the ‘natives’ – those who did not speak English or spoke it with a native accent – only as social inferiors, as clerks, peons, servants, peasants, low-ranking military officers and nameless jawans in the army.

Imran Khan provides several vignettes from the social life of these brown sahibs in Pakistan. “In the Gymkhana and the Punjab Club in Lahore,” he writes, “Pakistanis pretended to be English. Everyone spoke English including the waiters; the men dressed in suits; we, the members’ children, watched English films while the grown-ups danced to Western music on a Saturday night (43).” At Aitchison College, where the sons of Punjab’s landed elites were trained to become brown sahibs, boys “caught speaking in Urdu during school hours were fined, despite it being the official language of Pakistan (47).” Elsewhere, he writes, “When I was a boy I remember one of my uncles asking a cousin of mine, who was wearing shalwar kameez, why he was dressed like a servant (49-50).” Asked if he could speak Urdu – I can recall – the son of leading civil servant who served during General Ayub Khan’s tenure, shot back, “Only a little, when talking to the servants.”

Led by Iqbal, Jinnah and a small band of dedicated leaders – from the various provinces of British India – the struggles and sacrifices of ordinary Muslims had created a country they had hoped would make them proud, a country that would be guided by the highest Islamic ideals of justice, a country where they would be safe, where they could prosper, a country that would be a source of strength for the Muslims they had left behind in India, a country that would offer inspiration and leadership to the Islamicate. This was not to be. Within a few years of gaining independence, the brown sahibs in Pakistan seized control over the affairs of the country. That was the beginning of Pakistan’s descent into a shameless kleptocracy in the service of foreign powers.

“Far from shaking off colonialism,” writes Imran Khan, “our ruling elite slipped into its shoes (43-44).” Our brown sahibs made no significant changes to the colonial structures developed by the British to keep their Indian subjects on a tight leash. This omission was deliberate: the intent was to keep the ‘natives’ down, to continue to smother their long-suppressed energies, to stifle their creativity. As a result, the economy that Pakistan’s elites promoted soon became dependent on foreign loans; its capitalist class built its wealth on defaulted loans; its manufacturing sector could not move too far beyond processing raw materials; the educational standards at state institutions were allowed to deteriorate so that quality education was confined to the rich; and sixty years after independence more than half the population remains illiterate.

Over time, the emerging middle classes too began to mould themselves in the image of the brown sahibs. Since Urdu or the regional languages would get them nowhere in Pakistan’s private or public sectors, they began sending their children to English schools. Under colonial rule, the Muslim middle classes had abandoned Arabic and Persian, thus losing contact with the classics of their civilization; in the sixty years since gaining nominal independence, the new generations that attended English schools have become strangers to Urdu as well. Were it not for the logic of audience ratings – most viewers do not understand English – that forced the proliferating television channels to run their programs in Urdu, spoken Urdu too would be on its way out. Nevertheless, many of the actors who play lead roles in the Urdu serials can scarcely carry on a conversation in Urdu; the credits for these serials too are often presented in English. A growing number of commercial billboards in the cities also display their Urdu slogans and jingles in Roman letters.

The style of education at Aitchison College – the elite boarding school that he attended – Imran Khan writes, transformed Pakistani students “into cheap imitations of English public school boys.” These students adopted Western sportsmen, actors and pop stars as their role models. Only much later did Imran Khan come to understand how much this “education dislocated our sense of ourselves as a nation.” A generation later, this cultural dislocation is being reproduced on a much larger scale in dozens of elite schools – all run as profit-making enterprises – that prepare their students for the Cambridge O-level and A-level exams. As a result, writes Imran Khan, “Today our English-language schools produce ‘Desi Americans’ – young kids who, though they have never been out of Pakistan, have not only perfected the American twang but all the mannerisms (including the tilt of the baseball cap) just by watching Hollywood films.” In imitation, poorer children too are deserting the state-run Urdu schools to attend poorly staffed English medium schools run out of apartments but carrying exotic labels. Some are named after Catholic saints, in a tawdry attempt to bask in the prestige of Christian missionary schools. Others carry more hilarious names. One school, less inclined to borrow the halo of Catholic saints, calls itself, Oxford and Cambridge Islamic English-Medium School. I am aware that this faux Anglicization is being driven by global forces as well, but – in the Islamic world alone – Turkey, Iran and Indonesia continue to give primacy to their national languages.

A slavish Westernization among the elites has forced Pakistan into intel-lectual sterility. Over the past century, these Westernized classes have produced little world-class scholarship on the country’s history or social and economic structures; their scientific production too remains mostly meager and mediocre, if not worse. Nearly all the great Muslim thinkers and writers of the previous hundred and fifty years in South Asia had received their early education in wholly or partly traditional setting; and this includes Ghalib, Hali, Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul Kalam Azad, Shibli Nu’mani, Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, Saleemuzzaman Siddiqui, and Faiz, to name only a few illustrious figures from that period. Yet the growing cohorts of Western-educated Muslims since the 1900s have produced scarce any thinker or writer who could stand comparison with their predecessors. As the middle classes too increasingly submit themselves to the same shallow Westernization, this has deepened the poverty of Muslim intellect in South Asia. As the shift towards Western education has drained the Madrasas of its recruits from the middle classes, this has produced another deleterious effect: the coarsening of the Islamic discourse that flows from the madrasas. Imran Khan is deeply cognizant of this intellectual malaise. “If our Westernized classes started to study Islam,” writes Imran Khan, “not only would it be able to project the dynamic spirit of Islam but also help our society fight sectarianism and extremism… How can the group that is in the best position to project Islam do so when it sees Islam through Western eyes? The most damaging aspect of the gulf between the two sections of our society is that it has stopped the evolution of both religion and culture in Pakistan (340-1).”

The coarsening of religious discourse in the West too flows in large part from similar causes: the abandonment and denigration of religion and its mystical traditions by the intellectual classes. In the West this process began with the Renaissance and the Reformation, gained strength with the Enlightenment, and reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the launching of Darwinian evolutionalism. As a result, over the past three centuries, Christianity has increasingly adopted hard fundamentalist positions – especially in the United States – that draw their inspiration from the conquest narratives of the Old Testament not the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Over the past half century, especially, the more fundamentalist variants of Christianity have become the refuge of whites who have been marginalized by the rapid economic and social changes in the United States. They vent their anger at immigrants, blacks and Muslims, at women who take charge of their bodies, and – paradoxically – at ‘big’ government, the only institution that could help reverse their economic marginalization. Increasingly also, they have been led by Christian Zionism and Israel’s military successes to identify with Jewish colonization of Palestine. In their commitment to Israeli expansionism, these messianic Christians are more intransigent than the Israelis themselves.

5.

Imran Khan blames the Westernized elites for the Pakistan’s deepening problems. Quite early on, these elites ensured that independence would merely exchange one set of white masters for another: the Americans for the British. Unlike the British, the Americans would rule over Pakistan through local surrogates; the brown faces of these surrogates would maintain the happy illusion that Pakistanis were in control of their destiny.

Although this neocolonial relationship has seen some ups and downs, starting in the 1990s, the top echelons of Pakistan’s governments have been appointed by Washington and, accordingly, their activities are monitored and supervised by the US ambassador in Islamabad. In turn, the Pakistani rulers and their cronies use the government to capture rent, much of which is transferred to foreign bank accounts. Pakistan’s subordination to the US reached a new low after the 9-11 attacks as the rulers – civilian and military – rented the country’s ports, highways, airspace, air bases, and, soon, its military to the US for moneys that have largely gone into private coffers.

Although Imran Khan does not spell out the manifold linkages that bind Pakistan’s corrupt rulers to the United States, he understands that Pakistan cannot move forward unless it ends its neocolonial ties to the United States. To this end, he sets himself several interrelated tasks. A Tehreek government will pull Pakistan out of America’s so-called war on terrorism; this means stopping the drone attacks on Pakistani territory, revoking all the territorial concessions General Musharraf made to the United States, and ending Pakistan’s war against its own people in Pakhtunkhwa. “Pakistan should disengage from this insane and immoral war,” writes Imran Khan (360). If this could be done, the chief factor that has been destabilizing Pakistan, pushing it to the edge of a civil war, will disappear. Pakistan’s military disengagement from the US will be followed by efforts to end Pakistan’s dependency on foreign loans to pay for gov-ernment programs, much of which have been diverted to private coffers in the past.

Is all this doable? Despite the dire warnings of slanted commentators, should Pakistan withdraw from the US war against terror, it is extremely unlikely that it would face a war. At present, the US has no stomach for starting another war even as it and Israel threaten to start a war against Iran. The US will certainly stop payments of the blood money, but this should not hurt Pakistan since most of this money finds its way back where it came from. China too will oppose any US attacks against Pakistan, and will stand ready to tide Pakistan through its balance of payments difficulties.

Pakistan can gain economic independence – Imran Khan argues – by ending tax evasions; this alone will double the government’s revenues. Ending corruption at the highest levels of government, therefore, is the Tehreek’s signature policy goal. Imran Khan has sought to develop a culture opposed to corruption in his own party; the Tehreek requires the party’s office bearers to declare their assets and tax returns; it has set in motion steps to elect all office bearers to the party; it will deny the party’s ticket to anyone with a record of corruption; and, it has promised to make all elected and unelected officials accountable to an independent National Accountability Board. Ending corruption at the top – Imran Khan maintains – will banish corruption from lower levels of government. I am afraid this is a wish not a well-considered expectation. It will take a lot of hard work – a variety of administrative reforms – to push back against Pakistan’s rampant corruption.

Reforming the country’s education system is a fundamental goal of the Tehreek. The country’s three-tiered system – consisting of private English-medium schools, public schools using Urdu and local lan-guages, and the madrasa system – is divisive. The English schools reproduce the class of brown sahibs and spread their pernicious culture to the growing middle classes; the poorly staffed and poorly equipped public schools deny the great majority of the country’s population a decent education; and the madrasas have become a welfare system for the poorest children. The plan is to replace this multi-tiered educational system, one that has perpetuated the colonial mindset, with a uniform system of education for everyone that will embrace mathematics, the natural and social sciences, and history while giving their proper place to the Pakistani languages, English, and the Islamic sciences.

Another important policy goal of the Tehreek is to create a system of local governance for Pakistan’s 50,000 villages. This will take local development funds out of the hands of politicians and put them in the hands of elected village councils, who will decide how this money is spent. They will also serve as the local government for the villages, with responsibility for maintaining municipal services, including a registry of births, deaths and marriages; and reviewing the work of local officials responsible for policing, health, irrigation, and education. In addition, like the panchayats of the pre-colonial era, the village councils will provide cheap and quick adjudication of local disputes.

Imran Khan has not articulated – at least in his book – an economic policy. Most likely, this omission is deliberate; he has had many occasions to set forth his economic policies but he has persisted in reiterating his position on a few signature issues, including corruption, lawlessness, and the betrayal of Pakistan’s , national interests by the rulers. As a result, we know very little about what policies he favors on infrastructure, industry, agriculture, urban labor, urban transportation, exports, energy, water, R&D, etc. This appears to suggest that he takes a rather Adam Smithian view of economic development. If you provide honest governance – I have heard him say this a few times – this will create the right incentives for all other matters to move in the right direction; the proverbial invisible hand will sort things out for the best. With their property rights secured, private individuals, pursuing their own interest, will generate savings, investments, innovation and, therefore, rapid economic growth. It is possible that Imran Khan has not had time to formulate policies in these areas; or he believes that the focus on a small number of core issues will best help to energize support for his party. In either case, it is this writer’s view, that he should quickly remedy this neglect. For good governance alone will not energize Pakistan’s people to become active economic agents of change. In addition, from an electoral standpoint, he is more likely to expand his support base by articulating his position on issues that are vital to the inter-ests of workers, peasants, ordinary citizens anxious for their health, and pro-spective investors in Pakistan’s economy.

Certainly, better governance will be a hugely positive thing for Pakistan; it can start to reverse the ruination produced by decades of rampant corruption. But good governance alone will not lift Pakistan out of poverty nor will it produce economic miracles. Objectively considered, no one will contest the British claim that they instituted ‘good governance’ in India once the rule of the East India Company was replaced by representatives of the Crown. Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that during their long stay in India the British produced a great deal of economic misery; unfettered British imports destroyed India’s manufactures; British capital displaced indigenous capital from the most vital areas of the economy; their destruction of indigenous educational institutions produced mass illiteracy; and they pauperized the Indians. Good governance alone will not produce economic development if that governance is not used to encourage the growth of indigenous capital, institutions, technology, education and skills. Good governance must also be used to correct past social inequities and the new ones that a capitalist system is certain to produce. If good governance is used only in support of markets and capital, it will very quickly be overthrown by the inequities produced by the capitalist system. Let us not forget that Western democracies – especially in the United States and Britain – are now mostly hollow institutions; they are tolerated by corporate leaders only because they can game these systems to perpetuate their wealth and power.

6.

Notwithstanding the surge in his popularity in the cities, what are the chances that the Tehreek, if given the chance, will be able to form the country’s next government?

If Pakistan had a presidential system of government, it is more than likely that Imran Khan would sweep the polls; the rivals that any party might place against him would look like cretins. Under Pakistan’s parliamentary system, however, he faces an uphill task. In this decentralized system, where elections have to be won in several hundred local constituencies, the Tehreek candidates will have to fight against the power of corrupt local incumbents who will use their traditional authority, their money, dirty tricks, thugs, and help from their foreign masters to defeat a challenge that threatens to end their plundering binge. Winning a majority of these local contests cannot be easy.

On his path to power, Imran Khan will have to face a showdown with several factions of Pakistan’s corrupt elites. Many top generals, bureaucrats, politicians, media barons, loan-defaulting mill-owners, journalists, television anchors, and leaders of civil society have become entangled with American interests: they have cultivated ties with various US agencies; they or their close relatives hold green cards; they or their relatives work for subsidiaries of Western corporations; they have advised or worked for Western think tanks; their NGOs have thrived on foreign funding; and they have become rich and are hungry for more. Perhaps, the corrupt elites may concede victory to the Tehreek, since they may soon engineer a return to power; but it appears more likely that they will fight back, since this will end even if temporarily the bonanza they have enjoyed since 2001.

If it appears that the Tehreek is going to win the next elections scheduled for 2013, will these elections be held or, if they are allowed to proceed, will they not be rigged to ensure the Tehreek’s defeat? Alternatively, the political parties in power may try to increase the chaos in Pakistan’s cities, and thus pave the way for a military takeover that may end Imran Khan’s political career. More simply, the CIA or some segment of the corrupt elites, or the two working together, may assassinate Imran Khan. Can Imran Khan forestall these subterfuges? None of these options are certainties, but not to anticipate them and have contingent plans to deal with them would be reckless.

The power of the corrupt elites will be hardest to dislodge in Pakistan’s rural hinterlands that are still dominated largely by traditional power barons: the landlords, dynasties of so-called pirs, and tribal chiefs. Despite his tremendous charisma and notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the easy route to electoral victory by co-opting the traditional rural power barons. This compromise brought an easy victory but, bending to the power of these barons, Bhutto proceeded to marginalize the left block in his party. At the same time, he implemented his farcical ‘socialist’ agenda of destroying Pakistan’s nascent capitalist class; he seized and handed over their industries, banks and even schools to the stalwarts in his party. Imran Khan too is aware of the handicap he faces in a parliamentary system; and – on a smaller scale so far – he too has opened leadership positions in his party to the old power barons. This compromise is certain to alienate the old workers in his party, but it also carries the more serious risk of alienating the young voters who have pinned their hopes for change on the Tehreek’s commitment to establish a just order in Pakistan. The propagandists of the old order are already hammering home this point. It does not inspire confidence when the Tehreek takes a strong stand against drone strikes but appoints a former foreign minister – who supported these strikes during his tenure – as the vice-chairman of his party.

Imran Khan’s defense of these compromises is not convincing. These old politicians – he parries – are welcome to join his party but he will vet them for corruption before he awards them the party’s tickets to the national and provincial assemblies. If the Tehreek cannot win the rural constituencies without enlisting the local power barons, he will have to embrace many more of their kind. Should he do this, however, he will surrender his chief strength – the unwavering commitment to reform the old order. Once the scions of the traditional political families begin to fill his party – even if they look less corrupt than others – the Tehreek cannot implement the reforms that will hurt the economic and political interests of this class of people.

Aware of these risks, Imran Khan is seeking to strengthen his hand by organizing his base, consisting of younger voters. He has launched a drive to register them as members of the Tehreek. Once the membership rolls are ready, he promises that they will elect their local, regional and national leaders. It is a formidable undertaking; it has never been done by any party other than the Jamat-e-Islami that restricts membership to practicing Muslims. If the Tehreek succeeds in this endeavor, this may begin to alter the dynamics of power at the local levels. As a grass-roots party with a strong organization, it could stand up more effectively against the power of the local barons. This will reduce the need to bring these rural barons into the party; the Tehreek could use them selectively to win a few seats in districts where its support base is weakest.

The Tehreek has a chance to extend its populist appeal to the rural areas with its plan to institute thousands of elected village councils. This is the only program that carries the prospect of mobilizing the peasants behind the Tehreek, but for this populist appeal to take roots, the party has to do two things. It must ensure that the rural population hears about this program and understands the benefits it can bring to them. More importantly, the Tehreek has to come up with a plan to assure the rural poor that these village councils will not be captured by the local power barons. How is this to be done? If the party members can be organized at the level of the villages, they can pit their organized strength against the bullying of the local thugs. The Tehreek should also create mobile brigades of young idealist college students who will be ready to travel and deploy to the villages to support – with their disciplined but non-violent presence – the rural poor during the elections to the village councils. The elections can be staggered to ensure that these college volunteers are available at the village elections. In addition, these elections should be held only after the Tehreek has had time to reform the police force.

Since it began drawing crowds, its rivals have accused the Tehreek of receiving support from the ‘establishment,’ a code word for the security agencies working under the umbrella of the Pakistan army. This is a smear. The Tehreek‘s support has grown because the people can see more plainly than before their country being pushed ever closer to the brink by the unbridled corruption of their rulers: and they see Imran as their only real chance of reversing their country’s slide into chaos. The Tehreek should continue to distance itself from any material assistance of the security agencies, but I hope that that it enjoys the tacit sup-port of the mid-level and junior officers and the jawans in the military, who cannot be too happy at having to kill other Pakistanis and whose lives were sacrificed by the military leadership so that they and the civilians leaders could collect blood money from the United States. In 1996, the Pakistan army faced a spate of desertions from its ranks as they were asked to fight the Afghan resistance and their Pakistani hosts. Although these desertions were contained, it cannot be doubted that resentment still simmers in the army’s rank and file against the military leadership for their readiness to do the bidding of the United States for pecuniary gain. One hopes that as the Tehreek ratchets its campaign, it will work in subtle ways to win the esteem of the rank and file in Pakistan’s army. The knowledge that their own rank and file have their eyes on their backs will restrain the generals who may want to extend their profitable partnership with the United States.

The Tehreek should also send out signals – convincing signals – that it has a second arrow in its quiver. It must let Pakistanis know that it is ready to mobilize its ranks for more forceful action if the corrupt political elites will use dirty tricks to extend their corruption binge for another five years. Pakistan cannot survive another five years of their depredations. In times of crisis – and Pakistan has never faced a greater crisis than it does now – the movement to save the country must be ready to proceed along two tracks: change through the electoral process but if that is obstructed the people must be ready to bring down the corrupt rulers through massive and sustained but non-violent protests. Victory only comes to those who are prepared to broaden their democratic struggle if change becomes impossible through the ballot box.

The profit impulse fueling this drive is understandable.  All it takes is a cursory look at the economic landscape to see why these speculators are drooling at the prospect of privatizing education.  Millions of students pulling up stakes, bailing out of the public school system, and enrolling in private or charter schools?  Are you kidding?  Just think of the money that would generate.

Mind you, these “education reformers” are the same people who want to privatize the world—the same people who want to add more toll roads, who want hikers to pay trail fees, who want city parks and public beaches to charge admission.  Indeed, they’re members of the same tribe who convinced a thirsty nation to voluntarily pay for drinking water that it was heretofore getting for free.

Let’s revisit for a moment that bottled water craze—that stunning marketing bonanza that made beverage companies wealthy and added a billion non-biodegradable plastic bottles to our landfills and oceans.  For the record, since passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), municipal water, unlike bottled, has been stringently regulated by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), which is why bottled water contains more impurities and bacteria.  It’s true.  City water is safer, cheaper and better for the environment.

Of course, there are people who categorically refuse to believe even one word the government (municipal, state or federal) tells them.  They don’t believe the census numbers, they don’t believe the figures in the federal budget, and they regard EPA statistics as little more than state-sponsored propaganda.  Fine.  You’ll never get these pathological skeptics to change their minds, so save your breath.  Let them, Grover Norquist, and Orly Taitz do whatever it is they do.

And then you have your beverage connoisseurs who (even though blind taste-tests tend to dispute this) insist that they can not only tell the difference between bottled and tap water, but can differentiate between varying brands of bottled water (Is it Evian or Dasani?).  Taste-test evidence aside, I’m not suggesting that these epicureans don’t have the right to make such claims.  All I’m saying is that they have abused the privilege.

Offer a glass of tap water to a beverage connoisseur (who, before the bottled water craze swept the nation, had happily guzzled city water his entire life), and he’ll flinch, he’ll recoil in horror, he’ll practically get the dry heaves, as if you’d suggested he drink from your toilet. I’ve joked with these people that if I ever introduced a brand of bottled water, I would name it “Placebo.”

Back to education.  The thing about private schools is that they’re very much like bottled water.  For one thing, you’re being asked to pay for something you can get free, and for another, they are largely unregulated.  Take California schools, for example.  In order to teach in a California public school (elementary, intermediate or high school), you must have both a college degree and a teaching credential.  The private schools require neither.

Not only can you teach in a private without a credential or degree, but private teachers earn significantly less than their public counterparts.  Less education, less certification, and less salary raises the obvious question:  Which institution—private or public—is going to attract the better instructor?  Put another way, would we ever choose a medical doctor with these startling deficiencies?  Yet, free enterprise hounds continue to extol the virtues of privatization, pretending it’s the cure for what ails us.

Another component to this anti-public education campaign is the Republican Party’s on-going attempt to subvert organized labor by attributing the flaws in our public school system to the teachers’ union.  In 2008, labor is reported to have donated $400 million to the Democratic Party, which has been a rallying cry for Republicans ever since.  Their stated goal is to neutralize the Democrats by crippling organized labor.

The irony here is that labor is furious at the Democrats for having more or less abandoned them.  America’s labor unions dump $400 million into the Democrats’ war chest, and what did they get in return?  A pat on the head and a condescending lecture on the virtues of patience from Rahm Emanuel.  Talk about a placebo.

The answers to this question — and the perspectives on the current quality of public education in the United States — are as varied and individualized as the 55 million students who attend public school in this country. Recently, legislators in Louisiana, like their counterparts in many other states, have sought to improve their state’s educational climate. They have good reason for doing so — in its annual Kids COUNT ratings, meant to evaluate quality of life for children in each state and based on measurements that include educational indices, the Annie E. Casey Foundation consistently ranks Louisiana as 49th (thank you, Mississippi).

As a public-school teacher in Louisiana, I can think of many ways to improve public schools here, and I heard the same sentiments voiced by fellow teachers during a rally outside the Capitol in Baton Rouge as the legislation was being debated last week (April 4). It seems self-evident that one of the best ways to improve public education would be to allocate more resources for public schools — to improve technology, to expand professional-development opportunities for teachers, to buy classroom supplies, up-to-date textbooks and all the other materials that come with a good education. Perhaps one of the best ways to improve public education would be to loosen the strictures that tie student and school evaluations to test preparation and instead to allow teachers to instruct students in the sort of project-based units supported by educational research and the sort of critical-thinking skills that cannot be measured by filling in bubbles — the sort of academic freedom that is praised in charter schools but restricted in traditional public schools.

Perhaps most importantly, one of the best ways to improve public education would be to work to alleviate those factors beyond teachers’ control that affect students’ ability to learn. They are some of the same factors that lead to Louisiana’s dismal Kids COUNT rating — unemployment, poverty, violence, crime rates, family instability, childhood hunger, access to health care.

No, no, and no, according to the politicians. What do teachers know about education, anyway? Public-school teachers, according to most of the Senate members who testified, are obviously part of the problem, not the solution, so it’s better to follow non-educators’ recommendations when improving schools. The philosophies behind the legislation passed last week echo the pro-charter, pro-private philosophies of distinctly non-local figures as diverse as the anti-union former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (who now finds her former district embroiled in a cheating scandal), the deep-pocket GOP puppetmasters the Koch Brothers and, most significantly, the American Legislative Exchange Council.(ALEC, a conservative think tank that prizes small government and free markets, hosts large meetings at which it gives politicians dummy legislation that they can personalize and file in their home states; its influence is clear in some of Louisiana’s education bills.) Similar legislation has been proposed in other states across the country, particularly in legislatures that, like Louisiana’s, are overwhelmingly Republican, and teachers and others with an interest in public education would do well to pay attention to what’s going on here. According to the experts in Baton Rouge, the following principles underscore our best hopes for improvement:

– Charter schools are always better than traditional public schools, no matter what the data says.

Charter schools, which receive public funding but are generally given wide academic freedom, are lauded as an end-run around the stifling bureaucratic regulations that can hamper traditional public schools. Why other public schools are not permitted to escape the regulatory morass has never been clear, and the new legislation does nothing to clarify the situation while handing over to charters some of the funding that had been reserved for public schools.

In fact, the success of charters is anything but proven. A Stanford University study found that being enrolled in a charter school was a “negative and significant” indicator for poor test scores in reading and math for Louisiana students living in poverty. Charter schools in New Orleans, a city that has come to be viewed as a model charter incubator in the years since Hurricane Katrina, have come under fire for underenrolling and underserving students with special needs. Four years ago, one of the most lauded new charters in New Orleans was Sojourner Truth Academy, a school based around twin ideals of social justice and academic achievement that was founded by Channa Cook, an optimistic young educator from California who was lauded by NPR and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. Apparently, the praise was a little premature. In November, the school’s board announced that due to low test scores, it would close after this year, and last week, the Times-Picayune reported that the school’s accounting practice was being questioned. Cook left last summer, not even sticking around long enough to see her school’s first (and only) graduates finish their high-school careers.

Some of the biggest cynics of charter schools at the Capitol rally were a group of public-school students from New Orleans. Their school, John McDonogh High School, is being converted to a charter next year.

“They promised us fifty percent of our teachers back for next year, but they only hired three of them,” said Erick Dillard, the student-body-president. “We’re trying to fight for our teachers.”

Students held a rally, after which the charter directors met with them alone, barring faculty from the room, Dillard said. The students said in the meeting, the directors told them the school would have a lot more resources as a charter, including iPads for students.

“It seemed like a bribe,” Dillard said.

“Fancy technology,” said Qwame Robertson, a sophomore.

Steve Barr, the school’s new director, who recently broke with the national charter network he founded, told a Times-Picayune reporter that he is recruiting teachers from New York and Washington for next year, not local teachers. He also opined that the main problem at John McDonogh is that students are bored — notwithstanding the fact that the school’s reputation still suffers from it having been the site of a shooting in 2003, or that a teenager accused of killing a Good Samaritan who tried to stop a carjacking was arrested at the school in January.

Dillard disagreed that he and his classmates are bored, or that their teachers are not good enough.

“I feel the reason why the charters do so well is that charters finally give low-funded public schools the things they’ve been needing, like new technology and new textbooks,” he said.

– In fact, charter schools are so good that they do not need state oversight;  again, despite what the data says, and they can bring in money for their parent organizations.

Despite a state audit that found lax oversight for charter schools less than a year ago, lawmakers have decided that rather than require charters to be directly approved by the state or by local school boards, the state should appoint local agencies and nonprofit groups as “local charter authorizers.”  The local authorizers must pledge to approve and oversee (but cannot directly run) at least five charter schools. For their trouble, local chartering boards can charge their schools up to 2% of the $5,053 annual state per-pupil allocation — about $100 per child per year, which, for a chartering board with five schools of 500 students each, would amount to a quarter of a million dollars.

– Private schools are also always better than public schools — no proof is needed.

They just are, okay? Yes, technically, there is no evidence for this assertion, if by “evidence” we mean the incontrovertible “evidence” of state standardized-test scores that politicians assert are essential in evaluating public schools and public-school teachers–multiple-choice tests, of course, being the very best way to measure all students’ achievements. If private schools accept voucher students (more on that in a moment), they will to be held to some sort of accountability standard, but the legislation is murky as to the details. And, yeah, private-school teachers don’t have to be certified. But they have such cute uniforms! And they pray every day. We should just trust them, you know?

– The way to improve public schools is to give them less money, while giving more money to charters and private schools.

Under current law, charters are financed by the state Department of Education from funds created for that purpose. Similarly, a pilot private-school voucher program for children in New Orleans was financed from the state’s general fund. Echoing some parts of a dummy bill from ALEC, the new legislation expands the voucher program statewide for children whose schools score “F,” “D” or “C” under the state’s new letter-rating system and declares that for students with vouchers or for students who attend charters, the per-pupil allocation that would normally follow a child to his or her home public school will now be taken from that school and given directly to the school the child attends. If just eight students left a school, taking their $5,053-per-student state allocations with them, that school would lose the equivalent of the salary of one first-year teacher — a teacher who could have been employed to teach 20 other children.

– Private schools deserve our tax dollars.

The new voucher program uses tax dollars to pay tuition at private schools — schools that, in Louisiana, are generally religious. The contributions will likely be welcome at some New Orleans parochial schools, given that the archdiocese is warning parishioners about a rise in tuition because it is running low on money. It’s a win-win!

– The way to help teachers become better teachers is to keep them perpetually in fear for their jobs.

One of the things that the legislation does is eliminate the possibility of teachers ever being considered permanent employees. Teachers must be rated “highly effective” for five out of every six years. If a teacher is ever rated “ineffective,” the teacher must improve by the following year, and if she again fails to attain a rating of “highly effective,” she will be terminated. The actual criteria for being rated “highly effective” by the state have not been released, although they will go into effect in August; we do know that they will be tied to students’ standardized-test scores.

This philosophy probably makes a lot of sense to people who have never taught in a public-school classroom, but teachers know that there are so many other factors that affect a student’s success that, while all teachers obviously strive to help their students learn, sometimes their test scores still fall short of a targets. A few years ago, a remedial sophomore whom I had been working with for two years bombed his Graduation Exit Exam. I asked him what went wrong. He said, “Well, I figured I wasn’t going to do well on it, so I decided I wouldn’t even try.” Theoretically, if this student — who passed the GEE on his next try and graduated in good academic standing a year early, despite his efforts to drop out –failed this test two years from now, his bad day could have cost me my job.

– All teachers are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

Teachers’ salaries will now be determined by a locally calculated formula based on student test scores, experience, and demand for the teacher’s subject. This means that, theoretically, teachers in content areas that tend to attract large numbers of aspiring educators, such as my subject, English, can be deemed less valuable than rarer educators such as, for instance, science teachers — and, accordingly, can be paid less. That makes sense; students need to be able to do science experiments, not read about scientific theories or write lab reports, right?

– Anyone can step into a classroom and be a good teacher; no special training is required.

Under current state law, all public-school teachers must be either fully certified or enrolled in a post-baccalaureate certification program, and 75 percent of charter-school teachers must be certified. The legislation passed last week removes that quota for charter schools; now, potential charter teachers merely need to hold a bachelor’s degree to get hired. The state’s overall pro-charter climate, and the new “flexibility” in certification for charter staff, would seem to imply that state officials believe that teacher certification is of little value, although officials haven’t actually come out and said so — at least, not yet.

This turn of events is not entirely surprising in a state whose top education official, Superintendent John White, spent just two years as a classroom teacher and holds no degrees in education. (Like Channa Cook, White hops jobs quickly. Prior to being named state superintendent, he was the superintendent of New Orleans’s Recovery School District — for all of seven months.)

Some public-school teachers have proposed that, if lawmakers believe teacher training to be unnecessary, they could come substitute for a day in our schools and experience the joy of instantly being excellent educators. Strangely, as far as I can tell, none of them have taken us up on our offer.

– Students don’t actually need in-person teachers, they need virtual ones — and the virtual ones need our tax money.

In a move that ALEC will surely applaud, the legislation also addresses “course providers,” instructors for online and virtual courses. These course providers can be teachers; they can also include colleges and business entities. Using allocations from the funding formula that calculates the allocation per pupil to the local school district, the state will pay course providers to educate not only public-school students but also private-school and home-schooled pupils (a la Rick Santorum). The state plans to create a course catalog of all classes offered by approved course providers, and all public schools will be required to include these class listings in their own course catalogs. Course providers will receive 1/6 of 90 percent of a district’s per-pupil allocation, or about $758, per student per course. At that rate, a course provider who ended up carrying a student load of 90, which is near the upper limits for teachers at schools with block schedules, could earn as much as $68,000 per semester, nearly $30,000 more than the annual salary for a beginning teacher. A course provider who amassed 150 students, the equivalent of a full student load at a traditional-schedule high school, could make nearly $114,000.

– However, in-person teachers must be held responsible for their students’ achievement in online classes.

The legislation states that, via their school-performance score, brick-and-mortar public schools will be graded on their students’ performance in virtual classes — even though those classes will not be taught by educators from the school, and even though those educators might not even be certified. This is bad news for the host schools, considering that a study by Stanford University found that students in virtual schools in Pennsylvania, one of the first states to allow widespread cyber-school enrollment, scored far below students at public schools. Ultimately, a public school could be labeled as a failing school and face sanctions if its students do not perform well in privately administered classes taught by people with no educational credentials who have never even met their pupils.

– All children are welcome at private schools — unless they have special-education needs.

Special education requires extra money for extra staff, extra professional development for those staff members, extra software, and extra materials. The expenses of special education, paired with the fact that students who receive special-education services are usually identified as having a learning difference only after struggling academically, are the main reasons that many private schools offer limited special-education services. Under the new legislation, a parent or guardian of a child with special needs who enrolls the child in private school using a voucher will have to sign a release form agreeing that the child will receive only the special-education services that the private school offers — which are likely to be far less comprehensive than special-education services at public schools.

Because private schools participating in the voucher program must accept all voucher candidates, refusing special-education services could arise as a strategy that private schools use to exclude students with special needs without technically breaking the law.

Some private schools already use special-education status as a reason to exclude kids. Last semester, a senior in my college-bound English class who has dyslexia wrote of her disappointment as an eighth-grader when she could not get into one of New Orleans’s Catholic schools. “They didn’t want me because of my learning problems,” she said. This student, one of the most determined people I have ever met, will graduate with honors next month. I told her that the private school had certainly lost out by not admitting her — but I felt honored to have her in my classroom.

– All children are welcome at charter schools — unless they’re gay (or English language learners, or not good at sports).

In 2011, Louisiana passed a bill that allowed for-profit corporations to propose and operate charter schools; the businesses are allowed to control half of their schools’ board seats and half of the enrollment slots. Now, legislators are using the connection of business with charter schools to try to allow legalization of discrimination. The Department of Education’s regulations state that “charters may not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, creed, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, mental or physical disability, age, ancestry, athletic performance, special-need proficiency in the English language or in a foreign language, or academic achievement in admitting students.” SB 217, which is awaiting action in the Senate, seeks to restrict the anti-discrimination clause solely to race, religion, national ancestry, age, sex or disability, the only categories protected against discrimination as it relates to business deals in the state. In a committee hearing, which was covered by a reporter for Baton Rouge’s newspaper, The Advocate, a woman from New Orleans said she refused to run a charter school.because she would not be able to bar students based on their sexual orientation

Given that GLBTQ students have reported bullying rates of nearly 9 in 10, and given that studies have indicated that GLBTQ teens can be as much as four times as likely to attempt suicide compared with their straight peers, using legislation such as SB 217 to exclude them isn’t just cruel — it amounts to child endangerment. The Advocate article also quoted the leader of the Louisiana Family Forum, a group whose stated mission is promoting “faith, freedom, and the traditional family in the great state of Louisiana,” as saying that the legislation was meant to send a message to Gov. Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican who appears in a video endorsement on the group’s website. In an e-mail to the article’s reporter, Mark Ballard, Jindal’s press secretary said, “We don’t believe in special protections or rights.”

The bill cleared committee by a vote of 5-1 and is expected to pass in both chambers.

–  By the way, all of this is totally legal — unless it’s not.

The authors of House Bill 976, the bill dealing with charters and vouchers, appear to be worried about whether they might be breaking the law. They were concerned enough about the constitutionality of certain bill provisions (perhaps all of them) that they included a clause at the end of the bill stating that if some component of the legislation were found unconstitutional, it didn’t mean that all of the legislation was unconstitutional. Hmmmm.

So that’s how to fix public schools, at least according to Louisiana’s legislators. Evidently, as a public-school teacher, I’m part of the problem. Maybe I should just go teach at a charter or a private school. Then I’d instantly be part of the solution, right? I’d automatically be smarter, more dynamic, more engaging. My students would automatically learn more. I might even get a free iPad. Maybe I should be a “course provider” so I can sit on my couch all day and teach online. I could double my salary, and I’d never have to write another discipline report.

Except. I’m not ready to give up on public schools, and I don’t think my colleagues are either. I’m a proud public school graduate who went on to succeed at a prestigious college. I believe that the education that can be received in public schools is the heart of the American dream. I believe that instead of starving those schools, we should work to improve them. I believe in schools that open their doors to every child, with no exceptions. I believe that schools that restrict admission, either overtly or covertly, to any students send the message that some people just aren’t welcome in the world. I do not want to live in a world like that.

And honestly, I don’t think that I’m doing such a bad job. My students are, on the whole, succeeding in my courses. Those who have graduated are now succeeding in college. Alan Rocha, a 2011 graduate of the school where I teach, and a current student at the University of New Orleans, drove from the city to attend the rally. After observing for a while, he approached the microphone and asked to speak. This was his message:

I am here for my teachers, who gave me an education that I would not trade for any charter or private school. I value the education they gave me. I am here for my sister that is currently in school, and I do not want to see her education ruined, because I am a proud public-school graduate. I am not a failure. My sister is not a failure. My teachers are not failures. Do not think of our youth as failures, because we’re not. That’s all I have to say.

What should one think when several weeks ago officials at Claremont McKenna College admitted that for years a senior administrator had been reporting inflated SAT scores in order to boost the school’s ranking in the U.S. News & World Report annual ranking issue? Or that tuition at public college and universities has skyrocketed 40% from 2001-2006 and that a typical American college graduate leaves school with a debt of $17,500 to go with their degree?

And it’s not just at the university level. About a year ago parents of a four-year-old sued York Avenue Preschool in Manhattan for not adequately preparing their daughter for the exams necessary for acceptance into elite prep schools and eventually the Ivy League. According to the suit the child in question was lumped closely with younger children thereby dumbing down the four-year-old age group’s lesson plans. While it is just and easy to criticize a parent that would sue a preschool for inhibiting their child’s collegiate future, what should the school expect from a parent paying $19,000 a year for preschool (that was the price listed in the lawsuit, according to the York Avenue Preschool’s webpage the price for four year olds has climbed to $25,925)?

Then recently several New York City newspapers were full of lists of individual ratings of thousands of city teachers based on what is called value-added analysis. Value-added analysis uses complex mathematical formulas (which, depending on which formula is used, can include factors such as English proficiency and income) to predict how individual students will perform on future standardized tests. The ratings were listed for 12,000 teachers who taught forth through eighth grade English or math between 2007 and 2010. Value-added alleged analysis calculates a teacher’s effectiveness in improving student performances on standardized tests, based on past test scores. The forecast figure is compared to the student’s actual scores with the difference considered the ‘value added’, or subtracted, by the teachers. If a teacher’s students performances on average fall short of predicted results a teacher is deemed ineffective. This type of analysis currently accounts for 20-25% of a New York City new teacher’s evaluation. While nobody denies such statistical analysis holds some insight (along with plenty of uncertainty since there are many different factors that may or may not be incorporated into a given formula–different states calculate it in different ways), it was perfectly obvious that the real motive of New York’s media was less educational and more an effort to discredit the city’s teachers’ union.

So there you have it: from pre-k through university. One of Barack Obama’s more famous sound-bytes as presidents was to declare: “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first class education.” This comes in the midst widening economic disparity and a tuition bubble that mirrors the housing bubble that led to the economic crash from which the country has yet to recover.

As far as universities go there have been no shortage of reasons and solutions put forward. Many reasons for the tuition bubble reflect the economy as a whole: decreased state budgets, rising healthcare costs, the influence of the Ivy League (their resources make other universities spend more), and of course simple greed.

This greed, especially surrounding public universities, was illustrated nicely by Kevin Carey in The New Republic:

Imagine you’re in the business of selling apples that cost $1 on the open market. Then the government decides more people should have the opportunity to buy apples and society would be benefit from a net increase in apple consumption. So it decides to drop the price of apples to 60 cents. Sometimes it does this by giving you 40 cents for every apple you sell, on the condition that you start selling apples for 60 cents. Sometimes it gives people vouchers worth 40 cents that can only be used to purchase apples from approved vendors. At first the policy works splendidly.

Effectively in that apples (i.e. college) is less expensive so more people buy them. However before long the apple vendor evaluate the situation and say “Hey, the market price of an apple is still $1. Would it be great to charge $1 for apples and still get 40 cents from the government for every apple I sell?” Since raising the price all the way up to $1 in a single shot would jeopardize political support for the program itself, the raise comes two, three, four, five percent at a time. When questions arise vendors could simply claim that apple production is expensive and that extra money is needed to make the very best apples. As Carey points out apple quality, like quality education, is largely subjective, so it’s a hard claim to dispel. Meanwhile the extra profits can go into hosting grand weekend sporting events and other goodwill builders and/or lobbying the government on whether any new seller can become an approved vendor worthy of subsidy, thereby severely limiting competition.

Carey’s solution to all this is for the government to create a framework allowing other, low-cost organizational entities to be recognized as providers of higher education. These organizations would not have to be colleges at all (Carey sites an Artificial Intelligence course taught online by two Stanford professors to 20,000 students around the world as an example) and in that case not needing approval from independent accrediting bodies run by existing universities, as recipients of federal aid are today.

In his book Aftershock: the next economy and America’s Future, Robert Reich put forward the idea that all America’s public universities should be free with graduates paying a certain, fixed percentage of their taxable earnings, he estimates maybe 10%, for the first their first ten years of full time work to fund current students tuition (students who choose to go to private schools should be would be eligible for federal loans and not be prey to private lenders).

While bursting the tuition bubble in a way that would lower costs and broaden access to higher education is very important the discourse about education’s importance in the ‘21st century economy’ misses a much larger point. The point is simply whatever the importance placed on a college education jobs needing a college degree of any kind are a comparably small part of the American economy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 20% of jobs in 2010 required a bachelor’s degree, while 26% did not even require a high school diploma, and 43% required only a high school diploma or an equivalent. As Jack Metzgar points out in an excellent piece on the Working Class Perspectives blog, this doesn’t figure to change much over the coming decade. The ‘knowledge economy’ is growing. It needs more than 6 million people with MAs or PhDs now and will need over a million more by 2020. Yet this will be less than 5% of the economy. Expand this to include jobs needing more than a high school education of the percentage is still less than one-third of all available jobs in 2020. That will encompass a lot of jobs (about 44 million) and within those fields that fall within that number more education does lead to more financial success.

But most of the economy isn’t there. According to the BLS the three largest employment categories now and the near future are office and administrative support occupations, sales and related occupations, and food preparation and serving occupations. Other industries that will produce the largest amounts of jobs in 2020 are child care workers, security guards, janitors and cleaners, home health aides, and construction workers. The conclusion to draw is the best anti-poverty program cannot be a first class education when more than two-thirds of our jobs don’t require anything of the kind. The best anti-poverty program would be higher wages for the jobs Americans actually have now and will have in at least the future.

Metzgar puts it nicely:

If we were serious about eliminating poverty or restoring the credibility of the American Dream or simply respecting lifetimes of hard work, we would be debating how to raise wages directly- how to make it easier for workers to organize themselves into unions, how to get the federal minimum wage higher and on a steady inflation-adjusted escalator, whether to require some kind of workers council for all employers, and then legally require that benefits of productivity growth be shared with workers.

In other words the 21st century solution to poverty is the same age-old solution that worked for generations past: working class organization, collective action, progressive legislation. For decades the harsh message to the American working class majority has simply been if you want success and security then don’t be working class. It’s past time to recognize the cultural toxicity of this and to wake up to the timeless truth that solidarity and community are more significant for our country than high-end preschools, the right college, and exploitive college debt. It’s as true in the 21st century as it ever was before.

This year the poverty meeting attracted a surprisingly large number of people, estimated to be well over a hundred. Many appeared to be ‘workers’ in the system – possibly on ‘company’ or taxpayer time.  There were also some interested private citizens.  A tiny number – maybe five or six – were real people, those who depend on the system for survival.

This article was inspired by the comments heard at the conference. Most showed a lack of understanding about the causes and effects of poverty.  The people meant well and were well-motivated. They were sincere and the compassion in their hearts was apparent, but many in our culture across the United States just do not get it.   Our culture is obsessed with a worship of wealth and material goods.  The bottom line is that we live in a very classist society.

In Bennington there are three very distinct classes.  First, there are the ‘fancy people’. They are the ones who rule and control everything. They are on the boards — the hospital board, the library board, the select board, the school boards.  They attend the formal fundraisers for the hospital and other institutions. They have the power — even the power over life and death. They, occasionally during a medical crisis in the hospital, make the decision to pull the plug or allow life to go on.

Then there is the large group of ordinary citizens. Some are blue collar workers.  Most work hard. Love their families. And have had family in Vermont for generations.  They acknowledge the class system in conversation often.   They call it the ol’ boys network – croneyism.

The third group consists of those who are in need. Those on the bottom of the economic pile.  At the conference some of the most impressive comments were made by a poor mother of two disabled children. She talked about the oppressive avalanche of redundant paper work required to get any tiny benefit.  The social services system is designed by nameless, faceless, unelected beaurocrats.  It is set up to assure maximum job security to the workers in the system. To a struggling family it often feels like an attack of the ‘paper churners’.   Being poor is a full time job.  Sadly, it often takes precious time away from the children.

Below are some observations, made during many years of studying the culture, not only in Vermont but across the US.

Poverty means living with shame.

Poverty means working three jobs, and still not ‘making it’.

Poverty means that you go to work when you are sick.  Worse than that you send your children to school when they are sick.

Sometimes poverty means that you skip meals so that your children can eat.

Poverty means that your housing is never secure.

Once in a while, poverty means that your child will be stereotyped and misjudged by his teacher.

Poverty means having no dependable source of transportation.

Poverty means that you will receive inferior health care – maybe no health care at all.

Poverty means that you have no access to dental care. Remember the death of Diamonte Driver – a 12 year-old Maryland boy.  His mother could not afford dental care for him. He died of a tooth abscess. An $80 tooth extraction would have saved his life.

Poverty is not like that described in The Waltons. Poverty can mean isolation from family and friends.

Poverty can mean missing your mother’s funeral because you had to go to work.

Poverty means you are invisible and voiceless.

Poverty means that no matter how hard you work, you will still be on the wrong side of the desk.

Poverty means that your hobby is not skiing or surfing.  It is surviving.

Living in poverty means that you will probably never hold elective office.

Poverty is declaring bankruptcy because your wife has cancer.

Being a low income father means that you will miss your son’s games because you have to work.

Living in poverty means that you have no options – no choices about where to live, what to eat.

Poverty means that you pay for the family groceries with a credit card – until it is maxed out.

Poverty means following all of the rules. Then graduating with oppressive student debt so that the president of UVM can be paid $447,000 per year.

Being poor means no access to gyms, fitness centers, etc.

Being poor means that you do not have equal access to the legal system.

Being a poor child means that you will be at increased risk of being bullied.

Being poor means that you dread the holidays. Your family celebrations are not like those depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings.

Being a baby in a low income family means that you might spend all of your infancy strapped to a plastic baby carrier in a day care center, while your mother goes to work.

Being poor could mean that you are the waitress serving Mothers’ Day dinner to other mothers in a fancy restaurant.

Being poor keeps you on the wrong side of the digital divide – no computer, no ISP, no cell phone, no Facebook, no Twitter.

Being poor might mean that you never get to see the ocean - never get to see your children playing in the surf…

Being young and poor in Bennington might mean that you never get to go to a library that doesn’t ban books.

Being poor means that you feel disenfranchised when there is so much focus on the middle class, and so little on the poor.

Living in poverty means that you care more about what is in your grocery sack than any news about Goldman Sachs.

Poverty means that your life-span will be shortened.

Even in death you might not escape the chains of poverty.  Being poor might mean that you have no say in the final disposal of your remains.  Cremation might be imposed, even if you would have preferred burial.

Being poor means that you carry the burden of the misjudgment of others.

Will the United States ever rise above the evils of classism and racism?   Is ‘poverty’ the new black?

Superintendent Deasy and the like-minded neoliberal BOE members — Monica Garcia, Tamar Galatsan, Dr. Richard Vladovic, and Nury Martinez — didn’t expect much resistance to their cuts, and had planned to vote on their education massacre on Valentines’s Day. Fortunately political pressure emanating from a broad and dynamic movement spearheaded by Adult Education students, allowed BOE member Steve Zimmer to move not only to delay the vote, but to instruct the Superintendent to provide a budget with different options. The BOE, some of them quite reluctantly, voted yes on Zimmer’s motion, temporarily saving not only adult education, but the other programs slated for elimination.

Within days of learning that the District intended to cut the entire program, students and teachers began organizing a coordinated response that was unprecedented in its scale and scope. Since the DACE program serves some 347,000 students, there was a sizable pool of individuals willing to get involved and save their schools. One of the first actions was a citywide petition drive. Students, activists, and teachers worked frantically to collect signatures supporting DACE. By Valentines’s Day Adult Education was able to provide the BOE with petitions containing 220,000 signatures of support. Reaching out to the business community, as a sector which benefits greatly from an educated workforce, activists were able to get large numbers of business to display signs stating their support. These were photographed and sent as evidence of broader community support.

Websites were set up for both the student organization — United Adult Students (UAS), but also a general website for the campaign. Activists set up a phone system that allowed callers to dial in and just by entering a code for their school, would connect them to the appropriate BOE member to make their feelings known. As the campaign progressed, phone calls started being routed to other public officials. In addition, letter writing campaigns were launched. In many cases local politicians were asked to write the BOE expressing their support for DACE.

Activities weren’t limited to lobbying style, however. Large rallys and pickets held at individual schoolsites brought excellent media coverage, particularly in the Korean and Spanish media, and more public exposure in general. Since large numbers of Korean and Spanish speakers are enrolled in DACE English Language Learner programs, the media coverage mobilized large numbers of community members who otherwise might not have known that Garcia and Deasy had Adult Education on the chopping block. The individual rallys culminated in a large 3,500 person protest at LAUSD headquarters on the Thursday before the BOE vote.

Adult Education supporters again showed up on Valentines’s Day to join supporters of the other threatened programs, closing down Beaudry Avenue. While thousands thronged the streets with banners and signs condemning the cuts, the LAUSD Board Room was packed with DACE supporters and speakers. All of the outreach to local politicians paid off. Among the speakers supporting Adult Education were Los Angeles City Council Members, representatives from other local politicians, and the Mayor of the City of Huntington Park. Other speakers included graduates of DACE, currently enrolled students, and educators. One of the most moving speeches was by social justice educator José Lara, who finished his presentation with a scathing indictment of the cuts by saying “ladies and gentlemen, this is an educational injustice.”

The campaign has also received national attention, with the Washington D.C. based National Coalition for Literacy publishing a series of articles from students, educators, and activists on the ground, each highlighting various aspects of the struggle. The series, entitled, Cut the Excuses, not education, is an excellent resource both in terms of the documenting the struggle, but also providing ideas for other struggles.

Despite the massive outpouring of community support and widespread political support, the BOE Members supporting the neoliberal agenda of the Coalition for School Reform — a right-wing organization funded by the likes of Philip Anschutz, Eli Broad, Jerry Perenchio, and others — are intractable, as evidenced by Tamar Galatsan’s March 10, 2012 Op-Ed in the Daily News, where she insisted that there’s no money and the cuts have to be made. This simply isn’t true, as there are literally hundreds of millions of dollars that could be cut in other areas:

… More sickening is that LAUSD actually has money as evidenced by massive spending on useless assessments and consultants, highly discredited value added methodologies, and nine figure real estate giveaways to lucrative charter corporations …

On March 13, 2013, the Superintendent presented a budget that still zeroed out many programs including DACE, but explained that the District would revise the budget based on two conditions: first that the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) take yet another pay cut (most likely in the form of furlough days), and second, that the state somehow is able to bolster the District’s budget. The BOE voted six to one in favor of the demoralizing budget. While many see this as a hardball negotiating tactic against the union, the effect on student morale has been severe.

Fortunately, neither the students, nor the educators that serve them are considering giving up the fight. Preparations for future actions are underway, and the continual outreach to organizations like Neighborhood Councils hasn’t stopped. There’s a great deal of work to do, but the stakes are too high for the community to give up.

Those responses weren’t surprising, given the role of an uncritical corporate news media in building support for the United States’ imperial wars of the past decade. Journalism routinely has failed to hold power accountable, especially in foreign policy and war, sometimes in ways so irresponsible as to be complicit in warmongering, as in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But such legitimate frustration with, and anger toward, the news media shouldn’t undermine thoughtful analysis. We on the left need to think more carefully about our critique of corporate news media, and a comparison of journalists with teachers can be helpful.

Those of us who believe in importance of quality public education are quick to reject the demonization of teachers, recognizing it as part of a right-wing strategy to privatize the education system. But in offering that support, we need not pretend there aren’t bad teachers in our educational institutions.

I have logged 20 years as a student in public education — 12 years in schools and eight in universities. In that time, I had teachers who were burned out, teachers who likely were never competent to begin with, teachers whose main interest was coaching. I had a couple of teachers who, for lack of a more graceful term, had about as much sense as a bag of hammers. Those substandard teachers were the minority; most of my teachers ranged from hard-working and decent to gifted and brilliant. But those teachers’ great work doesn’t mean we have to pretend there aren’t bad teachers.

The same can be said of journalists. I have spent my adult life working as a journalist or teaching journalism, and all that time I have also been an avid reader of journalism. I have seen incompetent, lazy and stupid journalists. But the majority of the working journalists I know, like the majority of teachers, fall somewhere between hard-working and decent to gifted and brilliant. Like teachers, most journalists are motivated by ideals about the importance of information in democracy and give it their all. I have tremendous respect for both crafts, and I like most teachers and most journalists I meet.

The term “teacher” can mean everything from the frontline K-12 public school teachers to university professors. It also arguably could include former teachers who have become administrators. When most of us express our support for teachers, we tend to think of the folks in the trenches with the heavy workloads — lots of students, lots of grading and lots of paperwork.

The intensity of my support certainly changes as we move up the ladder; I’m typically more fond of working teachers than of high-level administrators who enforce the rules and policies that I’m often opposed to.

The same can be said about the news business. I’ve worked in the trenches of journalism at mainstream newspapers and know firsthand how hard those frontline editors, reporters and photographers work. I typically am fonder of those journalists than their bosses. The management-level editors I worked with were, at best, a mixed bag; many of them identified with the wealthy and privileged above them rather than with the ordinary people below them. The managers often enforce rules and policies I’m opposed to. Likewise, I find little to respect in most of the highly paid television talking heads, whose compensation appears to be in inverse proportion to their ability to deal intelligently with important issues.

Too often, our critique is reduced to simplistic attacks on “the media,” as if that term describes a unitary group of people. We don’t talk about public education in that manner, but rather distinguish between the different kinds of work people do in the system. We should treat journalism the same way.

This shift, from a focus on individual teachers and journalists to an analysis of the nature of schooling and journalism, should start with an assessment of the ideological framework within which teachers and journalists work. There are two pillars of that ideology in the contemporary United States — the naturalness of capitalism and the nobility of U.S. dominance in world affairs.

Journalists will report on the worst excesses of capitalism and will include in economic stories the range of opinions voiced by those who accept the naturalness of capitalism. Likewise, journalists will report on the failures of U.S. policy abroad and will include the opinions of those who accept the nobility of U.S. dominance. But more radical critics of those two claims are, for the most part, invisible or caricatured in corporate news.

Some journalists recognize that there are legitimate challenges to those ideological claims, and the intrepid among them may try to work such ideas into a story through the strategic use of sources. But those rogue actions, however noble, don’t alter the overall pattern: Journalism reproduces the dominant ideology.

The same is true for public education. Those same ideological claims define the framework within which most teaching goes on. The textbooks reflect the ideology, and the vast majority of teachers don’t question it. Some teachers incorporate more critical material into their classes, but those rogue actions don’t alter the pattern. When I ask college students what kind of alternative viewpoints they were exposed to in their K-12 schooling, most say such critical ideas were never addressed, though some report that creative teachers found ways to present those ideas, usually looking over their shoulders to try to avoid trouble with administrators.

Both journalists and teachers work under a professional code that stresses neutrality. The goal is to avoid injecting personal biases into the story or the classroom, and to present ideas and information in a straightforward manner without prejudice. In some ways, that’s all for the good — most of us don’t want journalists or teachers who proselytize for particular political positions. We want information that is, to the degree possible, the product of rigorous critical thinking, not unquestioned allegiance to a politician, party or political program.

The problem with these professional codes is simple: Neutrality is an illusion. Teaching and reporting require countless decisions involving judgments that can’t be reduced to purely professional rules and procedures. Even the language we use conveys judgments; think of the difference between describing waterboarding as “enhanced interrogation” or “torture.” Neither term is neutral, nor is any other term. The use of language to describe the world always involves judgments.

Both professions claim to offer rules and procedures that guarantee objectivity. But within the narrow ideological framework described above, objective practices tend to reproduce the conventional wisdom of the dominant culture. When journalists and teachers play that objectivity game by the rules, they may appear to be neutral, because they present the world as most people are used to seeing it presented; when they break out of that box, they seem to be bringing in personal biases. In both cases, practitioners tend to internalize the rules of the game, often taking pride in their ability to play by those rules.  Those who challenge the rules risk being punished by the managers of the system.

Individual biases in either profession can undermine the quality of what students and audiences learn; there are bad teachers and bad journalists who ignore their responsibility to be rigorous critical thinkers, a problem on all sides of the various political fences. But the most serious problems result not from individual misconduct but from the collective failure that is built into the systems.

On the left, we are generally good at looking beyond the conduct of individuals and focusing on systems and structures of power when we want to explain how the world works. When we critique the corporatization of our school systems — both in the way schooling is designed to produce compliant workers and consumers, and the way schools are organized around corporate norms — we focus on the failure of the institution not on teachers. We don’t blame the folks in the classroom, for example, for the system’s obsession with standardized testing, which is undermining real education.

Yet when progressive activists critique journalism, too often they vent their hostility on individual journalists. Why should we blame working reporters for the failure of the objectivity routines they are forced to adopt by the institution? Are frontline journalists to blame for the way the demand for profits drive the decisions of corporate managers?

This is important not just to ensure we develop the correct analysis, but because we need to build relationships with journalists in our organizing work. Too often I have seen activists vent their anger on working journalists in ways most of us wouldn’t dump our frustrations about the school system on working teachers. I’ve heard progressive activists arrogantly tell reporters to “stop lying,” as if the problem can be reduced to corrupt working journalists intentionally deceiving the public. The frustration that produces that venting is understandable, but that kind of anger rarely makes good strategy.

I don’t offer this advice from above — I feel the same frustrations. When I read a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times, as he spits out the conventional wisdom of centrist politics in the United States as if it were a new gospel, I confess that I sometimes fantasize about using “enhanced interrogation” techniques to force him to defend his analyses that manage to be simultaneously banal and self-aggrandizing. Like many, I have shouted at a television set, as if the journalists could hear my complaints about the superficial stupidity of even the best of broadcast and cable television news.

So, to help those of us in progressive political movements stay focused on the importance of institutional analysis rather than complaints about individual failures, I want to propose a new slogan:

Journalists rock! Journalism sucks!

I can’t give any details of the exchange (for my house with my wife and my pets might be droned), but President Obama communicated to me directly that his presidency is in danger because even to most Americans, it’s becoming obvious that his treacherous plans to dumb down our students and make them easily susceptible to mindless corporate propaganda is under attack.    Apparently, the loss of the mayoral race in DC awhile ago has shaken our president to his boots. With Fenty gone, so went uber-educator Rhee. The people have spoken and Obama is in need of a scapegoat. Going after teachers and their unions is his normal procedure but ordering a hit on every teacher who received a poor evaluation due in part to the poverty level of their students would have been messy.  Sidwell Friends might have been a victim of collateral damage and his children are far more precious than DC’s other children, and even selective targeting isn’t always 100% accurate. Therefore, a change in figurehead is needed and Mr. Duncan has got to go.

The Obama administration must be saved. He offered hope. Nobody’s done that before. He’s offered something more than what his predecessors have offered and what his rivals want: open corporate allegiance and obeisance. But Duncan made the drastic mistake of enthusiastically carrying out the president’s agenda and as a nation, when we make a promise to back someone, it’s as good as gold, or until it proves embarrassing or politically impractical. Now with Occupy the Department of Education planned for March 30 just around the corner, things are coming to a head.

The terrorist leaders at the Department of Education hate what America stands for. They hate our individualism. They hate our creative thinking.  They hate every red-blooded American Norma Rae and are threatening our very standing in the world.  Our widgets (I mean students) used to be the best in the world. Now they’re outsourced.

These terrorists, led by Duncan, have murderous machines at their disposal; the spreadsheet, calculators, and deep pockets from Gates and friends.  They see each American child as a unit to be molded by their way of thinking and for the corporate bottom line. The president likes all that but he can’t show it. He’s on our side, remember?

But like the drones they are, the bureaucrats at DOE only do what they are directed to do.  If they’re told their mission is to leave no child’s behind left untested for God, Country and Pearson, they’ll do it. But their leader must go because he’s stuck in a new age of pedagogical thinking that is completely imaginary, supported by this administration; but the people are waking up.

When the President calls on you, how can you say no? It’s your obligation and responsibility as a patri-idiotic American. But there comes a time when even a calling from higher up has us questioning the moral value (or is it ‘value added’?) of the order. And it was for this reason, as well as not given clear directions as to how to do it, (and Mossad wasn’t going to assist in this particular assassination) I’ve decided I had better go public, hold on to my tenured position, and cover my ass.

Following the news of the student’s punishment, Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) organised a protest in support of the student. At a general meeting held after the protest, a statement of “no confidence in the university Vice Chancellor, management and Court of Discipline” was endorsed after a vote by the hundreds of students and staff present. A petition against the judgement has already garnered over 6000 signatures, with over 2000 of them coming from students and academics at the university. The university also continues to receive hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls from its alumni who are pledging not to donate any further until the university repeals the decision.

Before the hearing, sixty students and twenty dons signed a ‘Spartacus’ letter, which insisted that the protest against Willetts was a collective act and that singling out one student for punishment was “arbitrary and wrong”. In the letter the signatories asked to receive the same charge for the action. The letter has so far been ignored by the university Court of Discipline.

Gerard Tully, president of CUSU said: “The student body is demonstrating unprecedented anger over the disproportionate sentence handed down. The University has been caught out acting with no thought to precedent or to fairness, and ought to be ashamed of the message it sends. Two and a half years suspension for one person for one action is madness.”

Rachel Bower, a PhD student in English said: “Like the suspended student, I am also studying for a PhD in English. The punishment undermines the foundations of critical thought and debate that underpin our discipline, and supposedly the University as a whole. It endangers academic freedom, and makes me ashamed to be a member of the University today. I am glad so many of my fellow students have come out in support of our right to protest today.”

The U.S. Congress has an approval rating of less than 10%. Greedy, unprincipled billionaires own virtually all of the wealth of the nation, and pay a lower percentage for taxes than the poorest worker. We imprison a greater percent of our population than any nation on earth. We spend more on vicious, unwarranted wars than the 15 top military spending countries combined. We are the greatest purveyor of murder and destruction internationally than anyone else.

Our public school system is under attack, and becoming obsolete. A college degree has become so expensive as to be unavailable to middle class families. The safety net for the old and infirm is being torn asunder. Our immigration policies are so degrading and inhumane that there is a mass exodus from the U.S. by peoples who used to flock here. Health care is a national disgrace, and is fast becoming unaffordable to any person in need of hospitalization. Homeland Security looks more like the German Gestapo every day.

The list of failures and problems facing the country is unparalleled, and the public knows it. Everything from cartoons to serious news shows bemoan the catastrophic decline in this country’s standard of living, and recognize the incompetence and inhumanity of those in power. This is so, even though the public media is little more than a propaganda tool for the oligarchy.

What is the most astonishing fact, though, is that there are no candidates or possibilities for new leadership on the horizon anywhere! Obama is the best of the pack of wolves and thieves who are actively destroying this nation. 95% of those in Congress who are running for re-election are are  certain to retain their status. How in the world is that possible? Any rational person would expect the electorate to throw these pandering,  posturing politicians  out on their keesters, and elect a set of representatives who would radically change the picture. But instead, we are about to re-affirm the failed, dying programs that have transformed this country into a  violent, disrespected second-rate nation. What a contradiction in logic and reality!

What kind of national pathology is causing the electorate to allow the oligarchy to engage in this unadulterated rush to destroy everything of value in this country? Like lemmings, rushing into the sea to commit suicide, the voters will once again endorse the same fools who have immobilized Congress for decades, will do nothing to control a run-away Pentagon, and its maniacal weapons manufacturers, and will accept Wall Street’s unregulated destruction of our wealth and resources. There is simply no rational explanation for the inability of the American people to find alternatives to the elected gangsters who bow to every billionaire that comes before them.

It is apparent that the voting public in the U.S. feels so disenfranchised from the process that it has for all intents left the spoils to the thieves. By abandoning any process by which there can be meaningful change in the policies of this government, the people have accepted the fact that there are no meaningful differences between the Democrats and the Republicans. The wars will continue, the repression will expand, the rich will get richer, and the rest of us are on our own.