There is no shortage of articles, books, reports, blogs, and websites that continually detail the perpetually scandalous and troubled nature of charter schools. Not a day goes by without a report on some sort of infamy, fraud, mismanagement, corruption, or failure in the unaccountable charter school sector.
But even articles and reports that are critical of charter schools often lapse into confused logic and arguments, revealing that the thinking around charter schools remains muddled.
This endless confusion and incoherence repeatedly conceals and renders forgettable the profound significance of the core feature of all charter schools: their inherently privatized nature.
So here we go. Like a 1960s straight-to-drive-in Hammer Film Production, the 2020 campaign season has begun. Dig into your bucket of popcorn, pop the flap on your box of Good & Plenty, turn off your mind, and enjoy the show. From the looks of the trailer, it’s going to be a doozy.
That’s right, folks, it’s the final installment of the popular Trumpenstein horror movie series, TRUMPENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED! It will be playing, more or less around the clock, on more or less every screen in existence, until November 3, 2020 … or until Trump takes that lonely walk …
In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.
— Mao, On Practice, 1937
That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.
— Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, March 6, 2007
I think that most of the confusion in this respect has been the product of a failure to develop a class analysis of these changes. From a class perspective, it is clear …
The new generation of “pro-Western heroes” and “saints” is clearly failing to impress the world. Juan Guaido and Joshua Wong are definitely as right-wing as Mother Teresa was, but not as “credible”. *****
A long time ago I visited a place in Calcutta, India, where Mother Teresa used to operate. According to the Catholic Church and Western propaganda apparatus, she was helping the poor.
When I asked those who knew her personally, they described her as a spiteful, vindictive person, with a short temper. Off the record, of course, as to criticize her openly would be met with great outrage all …
The situation on the United State’s southern border continues to deteriorate. The American president, in a characteristic flourish of craven megalomania, has decided that his prospects for re-election hinge on his unique capacity to fix the country’s ‘broken borders’ and solve the problem of ‘illegal migration’ once and for all. To help bring this deranged and paranoid prophecy to fruition, Trump and his racist minion, Stephen Miller, have set out to purposefully manufacture chaos, fanning the flames of racial tensions in hopes of instilling fear, and greasing the wheels of further militarization.
Meanwhile, after crossing multiple countries by foot, desperate asylum …
There has never been more access to food – domestic and imported – yet hunger is an ongoing problem everywhere. In the U.S. alone, 16.5 million children go to bed hungry and 20% of community college students are experiencing “food insecurity.”
Never have there been more communications technologies, yet it is harder to get through to people personally than fifty years ago.
Never have people been able to use their right to free speech so unencumbered, yet a torrent of lies are now spread so freely and are often unchallenged.
Never …
Karl Marx used a metaphor about a camera obscura to describe the contortions in the interpretations of ideology, and it’s also an interesting metaphor to think about how information is delivered to us from power. A camera obscura receives an image from a tiny hole where the image is then projected in a state that is inverted and reversed, such is the perspective given to us by the powers that be where we are fed a myopic view and what is shown to the people is the opposite of what is really going on. The pictures taken from the camera …
Corporate pollution and releasing of toxic substances should be treated as a criminal act, with full power to seize assets for reparations, actual reparations, not just punitive fines.
Heinous. Savage. Ghastly. It’s hard to find the words to describe the act of luring journalist Jamal Khashoggi into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, suffocating him, chopping him up and dissolving his bones. Yet a year later, governments and business people around the world are eager to forgive and forget — or already have.
So far, not a single Saudi official has been found guilty or punished for this crime. The Saudi government has put 11 officials on trial but these trials, which began …
On September 16, I visited South Africa, a country where many Palestinians have always felt welcomed, if not overwhelmed by the degree of genuine and meaningful solidarity.
While having the honor to address many audiences in six major cities, I have also learned a great deal. An important and sobering lesson is that while apartheid laws can be dismissed in a day, economic apartheid and massive inequality can linger on for many years. Thanks to my interactions with many South African intellectuals, activists and ordinary folk, I learned not to romanticize the South African struggle, a crucial lesson for …
Catastrophic events that send the world into turmoil happen on ‘just another day’. The atom bomb that exploded over Hiroshima took place while thousands of ordinary folk were just going about their everyday business on ‘just another day’. A missile attack on a neighbourhood in Gaza or a drone attack on unsuspecting civilians in Afghanistan: death and destruction come like a bolt from the blue as people shop at the local market or take their kids to school on ‘just another day’.
Will it be ‘just another day’ when the next nuclear bomb is exploded in anger, an ordinary day when people …
Alternative Radio star David Barsamian comes to Newport for Rise Up & Resist
by Paul Haeder / October 2nd, 2019
The lifeblood of alternative radio is sometimes the celebrity that they create among themselves. And on Monday, October 7, Lincoln County’s KYAQ radio station will welcome one of the biggest stars from the bottom of the dial as David Barsamian visits Newport, Oregon on his Rise Up and Resist tour.
Barsamian grew up in New York, the son of Armenian refugees who fled the genocide unleashed in Turkey by the Ottoman government from 1915 to 1917. More than 1.5 million people were murdered.
The 74 year old will be at Oregon Coast Community College talking to the …
Throughout our days we all notice many things that elicit questions that quickly pass through us as in a dream. Here are some questions that I caught on the fly before they melted from my mind, and when I asked myself what the answers were, only songs came to me, songs that didn’t exactly answer the questions but set me to dreaming. This is an invitation to dream along.
*****
Two women out walking do not stop talking. An elderly man and woman out dining do not start talking.
Who says the most?
“Rally around the Pentagon!” is a phrase you don’t hear every day. It doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Support the Troops!”, which has been the undeclared war cry of the United States Propaganda Services for nearly three decades now.
Still considered to be the World’s largest office building, the Pentagon very literally keeps a low profile at a mere 5 stories tall. Even if the Pentagon were one day surpassed as the biggest office building on the planet, then it surely would remain the squattiest in its class. Nevertheless, in that event, “Rally around the World’s Squattiest Office Building!” …
Likud, the Blue and White party and Yisrael Beiteinu are ideological bedfellows – but other fears have prompted a stalemate
by Jonathan Cook / September 30th, 2019
It would be a grave mistake to assume that the continuing political deadlock in Israel – with neither incumbent prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his main rival Benny Gantz seemingly able to cobble together a coalition government – is evidence of a deep ideological divide.
In political terms, there is nothing divided about Israel. In this month’s general election, 90 per cent of Israeli Jews voted for parties that identify as being either on the militaristic, anti-Arab right or on the religious, anti-Arab far-right.
The two parties claiming to represent the centre-left – the rebranded versions of Labour and Meretz – won …
There are liars in the world and then there’s Donald Trump. A first rate unapologetic gaslighting manipulator of language who takes deception to the heights of hypocrisy. Bending and looping definitions at will where words themselves start to lack all meaning. It’s not surprising that the world is in its present state when a bucket of highly condensed lies is splashed onto the public by every sycophantic corporate media outlet and the rebuttals, like this one you’re reading now, are given little if any coverage. It’s a mouse squeak responding to a thunderous roar of media channel distribution.
Teatro Nacional de São João, Porto
In this year 45 since the overthrow of the ancien regime of Portugal, I went to the last performance of Nuno Cardoso’s staging of Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod (A Morte de Danton). ((Georg Büchner, 1835, translated by Francisco Luís Perreira, 2019.)) Since I have heard that this play has been included in the season of other stages beyond our borders, a review of a revolutionary play performed in a country with relatively recent revolutionary experience seemed worth sharing. The operatic adaptation was …
Much ink has been spilled in textbooks describing situations where autocratic states can behave badly. They abuse rights; they ignore international law and they ride roughshod over conventions. Liberal democracies may boast that they follow matters to the letter of the law, and make sure that citizens are given their fair and just cause in putting forth their cases. The practice suggests all too glaringly that the opposite is true.
The English legal tradition, with its historically brutal punishments, adoration of the fetish known as the rule of law, and a particular tendency towards a miscarriage of justice, has found a …
Reality clashed with the BBC version of false consensus in a remarkable edition of HardTalk last month. Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, was starkly honest about humanity’s extreme predicament in the face of climate breakdown and refused to buckle under host Stephen Sackur’s incredulous questioning. Sackur’s inability to grasp that we are already in a climate emergency, and that massive changes are necessary now to avoid societal collapse, was clear for all to see. His line of questioning attempted to present Hallam to the BBC audience as a dangerous …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / September 30th, 2019
Anti-Imperialism protest in the Phillippines. Photo: Carlo Manalansan by Bulatlat
‘Ukrainegate’ has opened the floodgates of impeachment in Washington, DC. President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky provided such an opportunity that Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who resisted pressure for impeachment, is now on board along with a majority of the party. Democrats are moving quickly to make Trump the third president ever to be impeached.
Conviction is up to the Republican-controlled Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, so that is very unlikely. Trump will probably …
China has made massive strides ahead in improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the countryside. That progress was at the forefront on Friday as officials held a press conference focusing on agriculture and rural affairs, as well as a major ongoing poverty reduction campaign.
Imagine being trapped in an endless nightmare where corporations are free to sell you products known to be deadly. You buy a blood thinner your doctor ordered that can cause you to hemorrhage to death because there is no antidote. The breast implant you just received has been known to cause cancer. Finally you are encouraged to buy e- cigarettes that are laced with known toxins that can destroy your lungs. Welcome to America Inc.
2002—
· A deadly lung condition was reported in microwave popcorn plant workers in Missouri who had been inhaling the butter flavoring vapors while working. The potential …
Building on the momentum of millions of people taking part in worldwide strikes to demand action on fighting climate change, an environmental group, Stop Ecocide, has called upon the International Criminal Court (ICC) to recognize ecocide as a crime against humanity.
Activist Jojo Mehta of Stop Ecocide defined ecocide as “large scale and systematic damage and destruction to ecosystems.”
Mehta blames leaders of certain countries for contribution to, and inaction on, tackling climate change and proposes that the leaders of such countries be held criminally culpable by the ICC.
Yet, in so-called democracies, such as Canada, do not the …
Nearly 10 county school boards in Florida recently took collective action to pursue a case against privately-operated-owned charter schools in the Florida Supreme Court.
These public school systems that serve tens of thousands of students oppose the dreaded HB 7069 legislation, which the neoliberal governor of Florida, Rick Scott, signed into law in 2017.
The law does many things, including allowing the transfer of enormous sums of public money from public schools to privately-operated-owned charter schools, thereby leaving public schools in a worse position. Understandably, public school systems want to stop the flow of tens of millions of public dollars to privately-operated-owned …
The tributes have been dripping in heavy praise: former French president Jacques Chirac and mayor of Paris, the great statesman; the man who said no to the US-led war juggernaut into Iraq; the man loved for being loved. Many of these should have raised the odd eyebrow here and there. “We French have lost a statesman whom we loved as much as he loved us,” claimed current French president Emmanuel Macron.
When greatness is tossed around as a term in French commemorations, there is always a sense of merging the corporeal flesh with the non-corporeal state. The person thereby “embodies” France, …
President Trump wants negative interest rates, but they would be disastrous for the U.S. economy, and his objectives can be better achieved by other means.
The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on August 30:
The Euro is dropping against the Dollar “like crazy,” giving them a big export and manufacturing advantage… And the Fed does NOTHING!
When the ECB cut its key rate as anticipated, from a negative 0.4% to a negative 0.5%, …
A prison, a protest, an art exhibit, a family farm, an antiwar conference, rent control, World War 1 and Hunter Biden
by David Rovics / September 29th, 2019
“Are you going to write something about this? If you do, I’ll share it.”
This wasn’t exactly a writing assignment, from one of the co-founders of the venerable anarchist newspaper from Detroit, Fifth Estate, but close enough to prompt a travelogue that I’d likely have written anyway… Peter Werbe and I were walking away from the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, after spending most of the afternoon visiting our mutual friend, Marius Mason — prisoner number 04672-061.
I …
The military-industrial-congressional complex (MIC) is the noxious alliance comprised of the Pentagon, the war industry, and Capitol Hill. U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard has spoken out against U.S. military interventions in such sovereign nations as Iraq, Syria, and Libya. While Gabbard’s public discussion of the costs of war rankles some within the MIC, she does not pose a threat to the status quo, even if she beats the odds and becomes President.
Gabbard spouts MIC pabulum (e.g. troops fight for freedom, and military deployments serve the country) and consistently votes for bloated military budgets. Gabbard says she is against regime change, …
The U.S. appears about to announce a peace agreement with the Taliban trading the withdrawal of U.S. forces for a Taliban commitment to exclude al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups from the country. (Presumably the Taliban themselves will be removed from the State Department’s terror list.) It has been under discussion for at least several years, attracting little journalistic attention.
It’s a deal that could in fact have been cut many years and many lives ago. The U.S. top brass concluded long ago that the war in Afghanistan was not militarily winnable (and indeed generating more “terrorism”). The Taliban whatever you think …
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!” With that unequivocal statement, Beto O’Rourke ignited right wing gun pundits who’ve kept some powder dry for just such a remark:
“Who is this “we” he speaks of? Democrats? Liberals? Bring it, fools. Come and try to take my legally purchased guns. I double-dog dare you to come to my house and attempt to violate my Constitutional rights. It’s won’t be nearly as easy as Beta O’Dork thinks. (Def-Con News)
“My AR is ready for you Robert Francis.” (Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain)
“Why do you oppose federal licensing?” Because leading Democrats are threatening …
