Facebook News

Blogging, Facebook and News! 
By Jim Vail


We're moving right along in the era of facebook and everything else.

I still like to read the fine print of newspapers, magazines and newsletters.

But I'm a dinosaur. I was born when the first men walked on the moon. I still can't believe it!

Today, we read about the latest scientific discovery, or my friend's trip to upper peninsula Michigan, instantly on facebook.

Just don't post how happy you are while driving and exit this world of facebook and immediately enter heaven, unless it is true nirvana you are looking for.

So what do we think of facebook? What do we teachers think of social media, especially in this age of billionaire driven education reform, believing firmly unions are outdated, and sweatshop labor is in.

Chicago Public School teachers - remember First Class? Remember when we could post all the time about our problems on a portal that connected all 29,000 of us in the city. We were a truly connected online forum of city teachers.

But where do we teachers gather together online today?

There are the activist teachers and delegates who regularly visit the Chicago Teachers Union website - ctunet.com - where articles are posted daily from all around, as well as CTU press releases.

The next best thing I discovered was the CTU facebook page. I realized many people visit it when they posted my latest story on Jan Peczkis, the teacher put on a Do Not Hire CPS list, but was then removed from it after we wrote about him and he spoke out at the Board of Education.

After the CTU posted it on their facebook page, I suddenly had my most widely read story to date, with some commenting about the dreaded do not hire list, and whether or not it still exists.

(Their facebook page boasts 29,000 Likes! Not bad CTU.)

I first wrote about the do not hire list when I was writing regularly for Substance News. CPS was actually putting newly hired teachers on this list due to the simple fact that they were not rehired at two schools, even if they were highly rated.

I tell people I edit and write an education news blog. We journalists do not like to be called bloggers. Bloggers mostly take articles produced elsewhere and comment on them and repost them.

I, on the other hand, am a reporter and I prefer to provide fresh news stories. God knows there are so many out there in the land of CPS.

Second City Teachers popularity is growing, like Substance News did, when it first appeared online jazzed up by its editor's son's fantastic web design abilities, about six or seven years ago.

The key to being widely read on the Internet is providing readers with a regularly updated quality product. If you provide the content, they will come - George and I have discovered.

But let's get back to facebook. I first steered far from this forum when Julian Assange once remarked it is the government's ultimate source on our personal information (and Edward Snowden later proved it!).

But then I decided I needed it to help promote my stories.

I then noticed myself spending a wee bit more time than I would like on facebook. I'm sure many people feel this as I see so many "friends" come and go with a flurry of postings of baby pics, funny cat videos and outlandish stories, followed by a stone cold silence.

Burnout? Exhaustion? Ah, we all need a rest from the rush.

I'm still swirling about in this forum. It especially keeps me connected to my Russian friends who seem to be just right around the corner.

But where can we teachers all truly keep connected in a blogging chit chat forum not owned by our masters? Certainly not district299 blog, that's owned by the conservative anti-union Chicago Tribune. The cops have Secondcitycop - but a lot of silly nonsense permeates it, keeping it rich, raw and ugly.

The teachers truly need to be connected in this day and age. But beware of facebook. Or Google - my web host - for that matter. They all work with Uncle Sam, who does not like unions at all.

Where can we go? Stay tuned online!

Charter Fights Union Again!

ChicagoQuest Charter School Staff Push To Form A Union

Progressillinois.com

By Ellyn Fortino

The staff of CICS ChicagoQuest, who announced in December their decision to unionize, held a public meeting for all stakeholders in Chicago International Charter Schools CICS on Monday, April 28, 2014, to speak about the lack of accountability from the CICS Board and the failure of school management to recognize their union and address school issues impacting their students.

They held an action outside their school because they had their approved space in the school abruptly cancelled by their CEO, even though the school is a CPS building. The meeting will then be held nearby at Seward Park.

You can follow these courageous teachers at https://www.facebook.com/events/817584884937375/ or read more at Story of the union of ChicagoQuest.

The majority of teachers and staff at the Chicago International Charter Schools' (CICS) ChicagoQuest campus on the Northwest Side are organizing to form a union.

Thirty-three out of the 34 staff members at the “game-like learning” junior high school, which centers its curriculum around systems-thinking and game design, announced publicly in December that they want to unionize in order to have a legal voice and actively participate in the school community's decision-making processes.

The charter school's staff are organizing a union "to negotiate a legally-binding contract with consistent, fair and public guidelines for evaluation, support and pay that will serve both to retain and recruit qualified and experienced teachers," the ChicagoQuest faculty members said in their mission statement delivered to school leaders last month.

“I want to form a union, because teachers and staff will do their best work if they have the safety and job security to take risks, push their practice, and be open about their needs and strengths," ChicagoQuest teacher Luke Carman, who teaches 6th and 8th graders, said in a statement announcing the staff's organizing effort. "Having a union will allow all parties at ChicagoQuest to be more honest, concrete, and accountable, which will directly benefit our students.”

Although charter schools are mostly taxpayer financed, its teachers and staff are not part of the Chicago Teachers Union. The faculty at ChicagoQuest, 1443 N. Ogden Ave., want to unionize under the umbrella of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff Local 4343 (Chicago ACTS), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT).

Currently, Chicago ACTS has nearly 900 members, representing 23 percent of all teachers and staff at charter schools in Chicago. More recently, Chicago ACTS became the bargaining agent for teachers at 13 schools run by the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), the biggest charter operator in Illinois.

Chicago ACTS was founded in 2009 when educators at three other CICS campuses — Ellison, Northtown Academy and Wrightwood — formed the first charter school teacher union in Chicago.

On its website, the CICS charter network says it operates a total of 15 Chicago-based campuses and one in Rockford, collectively serving some 9,200 students. CICS has a contract with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) district, but the Ellison, Wrightwood, and Northtown Academy campuses are actually managed by the educational management organization Civitas Schools, a wholly owned subsidiary of CICS.

Meanwhile, the school management company Civitas Education Partners provides the "back office supports" for CICS' ChicagoQuest, Ellison, Northtown and Wrightwood campuses. ChicagoQuest Schools, however, is considered the employer of the ChicagoQuest campus.

Civitas Schools' CEO Stacy Beardsley said Civitas Schools and ChicagoQuest Schools hold separate contracts with Civitas Education Partners, one for the three Civitas-operated CICS schools and one for CICS ChicagoQuest, "to manage these campuses and execute finance, operations, human capital and academic support for these campus per these contractual agreements."

Chicago ACTS President Brian Harris said he believes the motivation behind the separate contract arrangement was to prevent teachers and staff at ChicagoQuest, which opened in September 2011, from being part of the existing union contract with Civitas covering teachers at CICS' Ellison, Northtown and Wrightwood campuses.

"We all consider ourselves to be Civitas teachers," Harris said. "We feel we should be under the same contract ... all Civitas teachers need a voice."

Carman said ChicagoQuest has seen a lot of teacher turnover since the campus opened, which he said has led to a level of instability at the school. Teacher retention is especially important at a school like ChicagoQuest, as its instructors have to be highly trained in Common Core standards and able to develop curriculum that integrates technology, game-like learning and other systems-thinking concepts.

Carman, for example, teaches a "Code Worlds" course that combines math and writing. Developing teaching skills that help to drive the school's vision and mission "doesn't happen overnight," Carman explained. He noted that ChicagoQuest's sister school, Quest to Learn in New York City, has seen greater teacher retention and, as a result, a stronger school culture because its teachers are unionized.

ChicagoQuest, which currently serves grades 6 through 9, also lacks a public and consistent teacher evaluation process, according to organizers. Teachers and staff members, including game designers and special education aides, are constantly "looking over their shoulders" because they can be fired at any time, Carman said.

"When teachers and staff feel secure in their positions, they can focus fearlessly on what they should: ChicagoQuest’s students," the ChicagoQuest faculty added in their mission statement.

The organizers are specifically demanding that ChicagoQuest, Civitas and CICS voluntarily recognize their union and bargain under the existing terms of the Civitas union contract, with ChicagoQuest specific addenda.

In a written statement to Progress Illinois, Beardsley of Civitas Schools said, "ChicagoQuest Schools respects the right of the ChicagoQuest teachers to unionize and is in early conversation with the union to define a response to the request to recognize the teachers at CICS ChicagoQuest." 

"ChicagoQuest Schools has made no decision at this time," she added.

If the union is not voluntarily recognized by the employer, the next step for ChicagoQuest teachers and staff would be to hold a unionization vote, which could either be a quick and smooth process without "teacher intimidation" or one that management drags out for years, Harris explained.

Carman added that ChicagoQuest's staff members are prepared to provide school leaders with "all documents necessary to legally form a union."

"Our union will exist," he stressed.

Additionally, ChicagoQuest staffers want CICS to agree to terms for future union organizing and bargaining at other CICS schools.

That last demand is important, Harris said, because charter school teachers in general often feel "terrified that they're going to be fired" if they participate in union organizing.

"The charter school movement was founded to deny teachers their labor rights," he continued. "Nobody goes into the charter schools thinking their boss is in favor of a union."

A CICS representative said the charter network had no comment. A ChicagoQuest administrator could not be reached for comment.

Photo courtesy of Chicago ACTS

Lets Rate Colleges Next!

Obama Administration Plans New Rules to Grade Teacher Training Programs

By MOTOKO RICH
Nytimes.com

Photo

Education Secretary Arne Duncan at New York University this month. Mr. Duncan said teacher preparation should become more like medical training. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times

The Obama administration announced on Friday that it was developing ratings of teacher preparation programs to make them more accountable for their graduates’ performance in the classroom.

Teacher training programs have frequently come under attack as ill-conceived or mediocre, and teachers themselves have often complained that such programs do not adequately prepare them to handle children with varying needs and abilities.

“We have about 1,400 schools of education and hundreds and hundreds of alternative certification paths, and nobody in this country can tell anybody which one is more effective than the other,” Arne Duncan, the education secretary, said at a town-hall meeting at Dunbar High School in Washington on Friday.

“Often the vast majority of schools,” he said, “when I talk to teachers, and have very candid conversations, they feel they weren’t well prepared.”

By this summer, the administration will propose rules for evaluating all teacher training programs, using metrics that could include the number of graduates placed in schools, as well as pass rates on licensing exams, teacher retention rates and job performance ratings of teachers.

A 2013 review of 2,420 teacher preparation programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that advocates tougher standards for teachers, found that less than a quarter provided concrete strategies for managing students in a classroom. Most of them failed to guarantee that teacher candidates would be placed with highly skilled teachers during student-teaching stints.

Any proposals by the administration are likely to stir debate, particularly a requirement that training programs release the evaluation data of their graduates’ performance in the classroom. Currently, 43 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have agreed with the Department of Education to develop teacher performance ratings that include student test scores.

Some education experts say that such ratings are not reliable and that it would be difficult to grade teacher training programs using standardized test scores. “This is about a policy that seeks to rate institutions on something that we just cannot feasibly link them to in terms of responsibility,” said Bruce D. Baker, a professor of education at Rutgers University.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union, said she supported improvements in teacher training programs. But, she said, the administration should not carry out “a quick-fix, test-and-punish, market-based ranking of programs.”

On Friday, Mr. Duncan said teacher preparation should become more like medical training. But educators warned that measurements could create the wrong incentives. Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, said that if medical schools, for example, were judged by the patient mortality rates of the doctors they trained, schools would never train doctors to treat the sickest patients.

“If we evaluated doctors based on that kind of measure, nobody would train AIDS physicians,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “They’d all train pediatricians who worked in the suburbs where kids are pretty healthy to begin with.” She suggested that rating systems for teacher training programs could be based on surveys of graduates and their employers, as well as pass rates on licensing portfolios.

In and Out!

Turnaround City

Schools Turned Around Again

By Jim Vail and CTU

The Chicago Board of Education voted to "turn around" Gresham, McNair and Dvorak on the south and west sides of the city because they are "failing."

They are to be managed by the AUSL (Academy of Urban School Leadership) private management group. They claim they are leaders in turning around failing schools. 

Of course, they aren't turning around anyone, except privately managing more and more of our public schools.

I just spoke with a fellow educator today who told me he does not like going to one of the AUSL schools located just around the corner from Dvorak.  He said you hear nothing but yelling from a very young staff.

Apparently, replacing veteran, mostly black teachers, who serve as role models in the south and west side schools, is part of the "education reform" plan.

Below is a press release the Chicago Teachers Union issued after the mayor's hand picked board of trustees voted to fire everyone in these schools.

CHICAGO—The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) released the following statement upon news that the Chicago Board of Education voted to “turn around” three elementary schools on the city's South and West sides. The move will transfer the schools’ authority to a politically connected business organization with ties to city hall:

“Today’s hostile takeover of three of our neighborhood school communities by the mayor’s handpicked Board of Education makes it quite clear that there is a war on older, African-American teachers and administrators, as well as the school communities in which they serve,” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

“After being starved of resources for many consecutive years, Dvorak, Gresham and McNair, three promising elementary schools, were set up for failure by our school district. While we are proud of the members we have working in 'turnaround schools' operated by the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL), our issue is that this dubious, corporate reform model has proven to do little but take over schools discredited by CPS and then, after receiving millions of dollars in support, take credit for the sudden but short-lived academic success among students.

“Nearly a year ago we witnessed thousands of parents, community leaders, clergy, educators and students begging to be heard as the Board destroyed nearly 50 schools. Today parents, administrators and teachers were forced to beg the Board of Ed for the right to a future, only to be slapped down and have their cries fall on deaf ears. Where are the leaders in our school district who are protecting the interests of these students and their constituents? This is why we stand strong in our call for a democratically elected, representative school board.”

Charter Corruption

Freedom Rider:Charter School Corruption

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“The hedge fund honchos and the Walton Family Foundation want to get rid of the teaching profession.”

Every injustice in American life can be laid at the feet of the richest people in the country and the politicians who do their bidding. Nowhere is that terrible dynamic more obvious than in the destruction of public education by the charter school system.

The fix is officially in for charter schools in the state of New York. The legislature finished its session by giving these privately funded “public” schools more protection than they have almost anywhere else in the nation. Charter schools are allegedly public schools but that label is nothing more than public relations gimmickry. In March a New York state Supreme Court judge ruled that the comptroller had no standing to audit charter schools because they are educational corporations and not “units of the state.” The charter school executives who usually insist that they are running public schools were strangely silent and for once didn’t disagree when someone said their schools are not public after all.

Charter schools are a scam inflicted on black and Latino children and are meant to turn education into just another profit center. These schools take public money without being accountable to the public and they are funded by organizations like the Walton Family Foundation of WalMart fame and hedge fund chieftains. There is no data which proves that they provide superior education. They don’t have to accept children with special needs and often expel children who are struggling academically because they may bring down the all important test scores they use to justify their access to public dollars.

“There is no data which proves that they provide superior education.”

Bill de Blasio, New York City’s newly elected mayor, promised to slow down the process of co-locating schools, shoving charter schools into real public schools and depriving children of physical space and resources. At Public School 149 in East Harlem, special education students will literally not have a place in that school. A Success Academy charter school already in residence is expanding and the disabled children at P.S. 149 will have to be moved elsewhere.

Teachers at charter schools are akin to fast food workers. They are the least experienced and have a high rate of turnover, all of which happens by design. The hedge fund honchos and the Walton Family Foundation want to get rid of the teaching profession and make educators as insecure in their work lives as everyone else in the country.

The protections recently given to New York state charter schools are the result of cynical collusion between governorAndrew Cuomo, big money political donors and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the last weeks before he left office in December 2013, Bloomberg co-located an additional 45 new charters into public school buildings. The incoming mayor Bill de Blasio had a rather modest charter school reform agenda. He didn’t propose the radical steps that are needed to eradicate them, instead choosing only to ask that they pay rent for taking up public school space. He even approved 17 of the new co-location plans.

But the big money people were having none of it. They worked with the nominally Democratic Cuomo to make sure that charter schools would continue to take over as many public school buildings as they want and not pay one penny in rent. Not only that but they conspired to get even more funds for charter schools from the state budget.

Cuomo is running for re-election in November 2014 and depends on campaign donations from people like Daniel Loeb, founder of Third Point hedge fund and chairman of Success Academies charter schools. Together they and others developed a lobbying effort which demolished any hope of the small reforms de Blasio proposed. A previously little known group, Families for Excellent Schools, appeared on the scene with more than three million dollars worth of advertising featured black and latino parents making the case for charters. Families for Excellent Schools is certainly not made up of any New York City families. Its offices share an address with the infamous Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst organization.

“Hopes for good public education have been dashed by the evil nexus of money and political ambition.”

It was obvious very quickly that the mayor’s little nod to protecting public education was no match for big money and his nemesis in the governor’s office. When Success Academy charters closed all twenty of its schools for one day, and brought 7,000 parents and children to a rally in the state capital, it was clear that they had won the day.

Kenneth Langone is the founder of Home Depot and chairman of Promise Academies. He is a Republican who nonetheless contributed $50,000 to Cuomo’s last campaign. “He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools. ‘Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,’ Mr. Langone said in an interview. ‘He gets it.’”

Cuomo gets to stay in office because Langone, Loeb and others like them keep him there. It is impossible to run a viable campaign for governor of New York state without raising at least $30 million. That means the rich will have access to promote charter schools or anything else they are interested in seeing come to fruition.

At the end of the day in New York state, charter schools and their wealthy backers got a very good deal. They not only won’t pay any rent for using public school space, but they can force the city to pay if they end up leasing space. They will also get a larger share of funds over the next three years, $250 per pupil in the first year, $350 in the second year and $500 in the third year.

As the saying goes, de Blasio got his head handed to him. More importantly however, the hopes for good public education have been dashed by the evil nexus of money and political ambition. It is unfortunate that the real families for excellent schools have again gotten the shaft. In the charter school business as in every other field, money talks and everything else walks. Education has now been brought down to the level of every other institution in American society and that is a sad turn of events.

Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Why Capitalism is Horrific!

Yes, Your Country Is a “Horror Show,” But the Problem Is Not “Two Americas”…It’s America

Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Editors’ Note: David Simon, the writer and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, gave a major talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Australia in December 2013. It was excerpted in The Guardian under the title “There Are Now Two Americas. My Country is a Horror Show.” His comments have been provoking considerable discussion and debate on the internet. Raymond Lotta has written this response.

Dear David Simon,

I am writing this open letter in response to your recent talk at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on the deepening social and economic polarization of U.S. society.

The picture you paint of the separate “life futures” of the African-American poor in Baltimore, and how this is emblematic of a growing divide in America, is a stark and grim reminder of the continuing reality of racism and the systematic oppression of African-Americans in U.S. society.

Your indictment of a “war on the poor” that has seen massive cuts in social services and the mass imprisonment of Black and Latino youth by “the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind” is righteous.

Capitalism has evolved historically into the global system of capitalism-imperialism. ... It has wreaked havoc with the ecosystems of the planet—and is now bringing the planet to the precipice of environmental disaster.
Gordon, who escaped from Louisiana slavery, 1863. Photo: AP


Results of Horizon oil spill in Gulf of Mexico, 2011. Photo: AP

After a U.S. airstrike on southern Iraq, 2003. Photo: AP

You express outrage at a political system that is unable and unwilling to provide something as elementary as decent health care—and wonder how it could possibly deal with a problem as monumental and “complicated” as global warming.

All of this and more are part of what you describe as the “horror show” of “my country,” and impel you to pose big questions about capitalism and socialism.

Yes, America is a “horror show.” But it has been from its very founding in slavery and genocide…and it has brought incalculable suffering to the people of the world. Indeed, America cannot be conceived as a self-enclosed entity. It is not only a society with a profoundly unequal and oppressive social structure—its domestic economy is the “home base” of a global network of exploitation.

Yes, it is essential and timely to ask whether capitalism is the only way and what can be learned from Marx. But the answers and argumentation that you offer are wrong and lead you right back into the suffocating embrace of the very system that produces the outrages that you deplore.

And so this open letter to you.

I. Marx on the Problem of Capitalism and the Solution

You describe Marx as “better diagnostician than clinician.” You seem to regard Marx’s “diagnosis” as a critique of the inequitable distribution of wealth, of capital seeking to “diminish” the role and place of labor, and of capitalism’s placing the “metric” of profit above all else. These are certainly phenomenal expressions of capitalism. But they do not get at the heart of capitalism, or at the heart of Marx’s analysis—which involves both a scientific diagnosis and solution.

In works like Capital, Marx showed that capitalism is not some eternal system. It has a history; it arose at a certain time in the development of human society. And he showed that capitalism operates according to certain economic laws, the most important of which is the competitive urging to produce profit and more profit—as a matter of individual capitalist survival. And that profit is produced on the basis of the exploitation of wage labor.

An important talk by Bob Avakian succinctly and scientifically breaks down how capitalism operates. Let me briefly quote from it:

If…money [were] in the hands of a socialist government, we’d say: what are the social needs and how do we apply this accumulated wealth to meet those social needs in the context of everything else that we have to take into account? We wouldn’t have to undergo the preliminary transformation into capital. But a capitalist, or a capitalist system, fundamentally cannot do that. Particular capitalists have to say: how can we invest this in labor power, as well as in raw materials, in means of transportation, and so on, in a way which will be most profitable for us? The defining feature of capitalism is profit in command and profit accumulated privately. (From “‘Preliminary Transformation into Capital’…And Putting an End to Capitalism,” by Bob Avakian)

Profit is not simply, as you present it, a “metric” or priority. It is the spur, measure, and goal of capitalist development. Capitalism is driven by the competitive imperative to expand or die. It is a law-like compulsion, like the force of gravity, of the system.

"Preliminary Transformation into Capital"…And Putting an End to Capitalism 

by Bob Avakian

Individual capitals, and we are talking about huge agglomerations, like transnational corporations and banks, are compelled to increase profit and market share in order to survive as functional capitals. The only means to do this are to introduce labor-saving technology, to shift production to where labor and social costs are lower, to more intensely exploit labor, to create more “effective” systems of control and management, and so forth.

Capitalism has evolved historically into the global system of capitalism-imperialism. It has transformed the world according to its brutal logic. It has turned human beings and nature into disposable commodities. It has colonized (and neo-colonized) vast stretches of the Third World. It creates and re-creates vast oceans of poverty and chasms of inequality. It is marked by great power imperial rivalry for global dominance. It has wreaked havoc with the ecosystems of the planet—and is now bringing the planet to the precipice of environmental disaster. This is a world in which 18,000 children die each and every day of preventable disease and malnutrition.

Capitalism-imperialism has produced global economic crises. It has led to two horrendous world wars, and to imperial wars and occupations in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Tens of millions have died as a consequence of this particular set of social arrangements, just in the past century—and more than 5 million have died in the ongoing Congo civil wars that have been taken advantage of, if not directly fueled, by rival imperial powers.

Marx’s solution, and the solution of Marxism or communism (which has been further developed and deepened through the 20th and into the 21st centuries), is scientifically grounded:

Unless and until this system is done away with through communist revolution—a revolution that makes the means of producing the necessities of life the common property of society, and does this in a way that is part of overcoming the very division of society into classes and all the institutions, practices and ideas that reinforce that division—then this capitalist system, operating according to its logic, will continue to exact its horrendous toll on humanity and nature.

II. Is This the World You Really Want to Live In?

You are prepared to go a certain distance in decrying the “horror show.” But you are quick to pronounce that you remain “committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century.” Why? Because capitalism is, in your view, an incredible and irreplaceable economic “engine.” As though a social-economic system were a piece of machinery. And who is this “we”?

Please, tell me how Apple, that paragon of 21st century “market capitalism,” is an “engine” of wealth creation absent the super-exploitation of workers producing the iPod components in the bowels of China’s export-processing zones? We’re talking about young women and migrants from the rural areas laboring 12-14 hours a day, risking life and limb, living in military-style dormitories, and driven to such despair that mass suicide jumps became a necessary form of protest.

Please tell me how oil companies “generate wealth” absent the plundering and heating up of the planet?

Please tell me how “intellectual property rights,” so central to the functioning of modern capitalism and the cause of needed medicines and treatments being priced out of reach of much of the world’s poor…please tell me how this is part of some “great toolbox” that, in your words, “allows society to advance”?

Do you really want to live in that kind of world in the “coming century”?

III. The Real Deal About the “New Deal” and the “American Century”

I don’t believe you do. But the solutions you offer will work against the very impulses that drive you to condemn what capitalism has done. You call for a capitalism that better “distributes its benefits” and you hark back to the 1930s and the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). This, you say, was a time when a “communal logic” and “social compact” between capital and labor was forged, with “no one left behind.”

But let’s look at what the New Deal was essentially about. The economic and social measures of the New Deal were launched by the dominant section of the U.S. ruling class to prevent the collapse of capitalism. The U.S. and world economy in the 1930s were in the grips of the worst crisis in the history of capitalism. The New Deal was designed to rescue and rationalize the banking system, to stimulate industrial production and job creation, and to establish new regulations and forms of government intervention in order to stabilize capitalism and restore profitability.

The New Deal was also decisively aimed at preventing mass social upheaval, including the possibility of revolution. The Roosevelt years were about repressing and co-opting resistance, and restoring people’s dwindling faith in the system. That’s why unions were recognized and institutionalized, that’s why social programs were enacted, and that’s why FDR spouted the rhetoric of easing the plight of the dispossessed.

There are two “dirty little secrets” of the New Deal.

First, the New Deal was not, as the official narrative proclaims, about social justice. Segregation and white privilege were built into the foundations of the welfare state that was established during the New Deal years and after. Social spending and social programs were racially differentiated—with white workers receiving more of the unemployment benefits and Black workers put into welfare lines. Federal housing programs inaugurated practices like “redlining” (where prospective white and Black homeowners were steered into different neighborhoods). Ira Katznelson’s groundbreaking study of these policies has the apt title: When Affirmative Action Was White.

Second, the government social programs of the New Deal did not get the U.S. out of the Great Depression. No, it was World War 2 and its particular outcome.

You speak admiringly of the “American century” and America’s industrial prowess and ability to raise living standards after World War 2. The truth of the “American century” is that, as a result of World War 2, the U.S. became, far and away, the dominant world imperialist power. The U.S.’s wartime rivals, German and Japanese imperialism, were defeated. The U.S.’s victorious wartime allies, British and French imperialism, were greatly weakened and their colonial empires shaken.

The U.S. emerged from World War 2 with its productive base intact. Contrast this with the socialist Soviet Union, where one-third of the national wealth was obliterated and where 26 million (roughly 1 in 8 of the population) perished in the war. You may have seen Oliver Stone’s series that documents how the U.S. in fact took advantage of its power to isolate the Soviet Union, with the conscious goal of starving it out and forcing it to its knees.

In these circumstances, the U.S. forged the most extensive and integrated global empire in world history. The U.S. imperialists imposed the dollar as the global currency. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund, created as World War 2 was ending, enabled the U.S. to control the economic lifeblood and shape the development of economies of the Third World. The U.S. was able to secure cheap raw materials and obtain high profits from low-cost manufacturing and agribusiness in the Third World.

The whole structure of the U.S. economy, the growth of its middle-class, the vast streams of super-exploitable immigrants (from Mexico and Latin America and then from Asia) laboring in the shadows, and its fabled prosperity—all this has rested on America’s privileged position in the global economy. And this privileged position, in turn, has been backed up and enforced by the most massive military machine of death and destruction in human history.

As for the “consumer society” celebrated in the West, three things. One, it is not something to aspire to—and even you speak of America producing “shit that people wanted but didn’t really need”; two, it is environmentally insane (it would take the resources of almost 5 Earths if the rest of the world had the same ecological footprint of America’s consumer society); and three, America’s great “consumer engine” is based on the misery of the enslaved and oppressed of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (the “convenience” of child laborers cultivating high-quality cocoa in the Ivory Coast; or of women workers dying in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh for the sake of new seasonal fashion lines).

America is a class-divided, deeply polarized, and segmented society. But it is not “two societies,” or “two Americas.” It is, as I stated earlier, a society with a profoundly unequal and oppressive social structure, and the domestic economy is the “home base” of a global network of exploitation.

The life paths and “life futures” of Black people that you touch on have been shaped by the needs, transformations, and international position of U.S. capitalism: first, as slaves; then as sharecroppers; then, with the Great Migration from the rural South to the North in the 20th century, and accelerating after World 2, occupying a caste-like position in the lower rungs of the proletariat.

Today, for those millions still locked in the inner cities and condemned to the lower rungs of American society, they are increasingly becoming—from the standpoint of capital—a surplus, expendable, and “dangerous” section of the population. The so-called “war on drugs,” with its world-historic levels of incarceration and police-state tactics in the ghettoes, and which you have decried and exposed…this is the response of U.S. capitalism to that fact.

IV. The Argument Is NOT Over…Socialism IS the Viable and Visionary Alternative

You say that you “lived through the 20th century…[and] don’t believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism” and that “the argument [about the economic viability of socialism] is over.” Here I must set the record straight.

Socialism is not any kind of “state-run” economy; nor is it a fairer distribution of income and social benefits that can be grafted on to a system based on exploitation.

No, socialism is something radically different and radically liberatory. It is, fundamentally, three things:

Socialism is a new political-state power in which the formerly oppressed and exploited, in alliance with the great majority of society, rule over old and new exploiters and have the capacity to change society and change themselves.

It is a new economic system in which public-state ownership replaces private ownership of the major means of production and in which production for social need replaces production for profit. This is an economy that is consciously planned to serve the all-around betterment of humanity, the advance of the world revolution, and the protection of the ecosystems of the planet.

Finally, socialism is a whole historical period of transition and transformation in which the masses of people, led by a vanguard party, are carrying out great struggles and transformations to overcome the inequalities and ideological influences of capitalism and to move towards communism: a world community of humanity.

Now the Soviet revolution of 1917-56 and the Chinese revolution of 1949-76 were the first attempts to build real socialist societies. These were the most liberating episodes in human history: unprecedented in what they set out to achieve and unprecedented in what they actually accomplished. But this experience that involved more than a quarter of humanity during the 20th century fighting for a whole different future—has been viciously distorted and vilified.

In a recent, wide-ranging interview, “You Don’t Know What You Think You ‘Know’ About the Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future,” I survey this experience and take on the lies and slanders directed against it. I encourage you to read it.

I talk about the role and importance of leadership in these revolutions. I discuss how these first socialist revolutions set out to overcome the oppression of minority nationalities and to liberate women, and how they tackled mass poverty and issues of health. I explore how these revolutions empowered the former “have-nots,” “nobodies,” and “expendables” of those societies. I talk about the creation of revolutionary culture. Of how these societies sought to overcome the great gaps between those who have been trained to work in the realm of ideas and administration and the great majority of those who are mainly working with their backs and hands.

It is alleged that socialist economies are simply incapable of creating mass wealth. Nonsense. The Soviet Union when it was socialist and China during the period of Mao’s leadership went from societies of terrible deprivation for the masses into ones where the material needs of the people were being met, on a steadily expanding scale—and this in the face of vengeful embargos. When the Maoist revolution came to power in 1949, it carried through the most massive reduction in poverty and attack on inequality in history, lifting hundreds of millions out of destitution; and it established the most egalitarian health care system in the world, based on the principle of serving the people, with essential primary care reaching practically the entire population.

Again, something new and truly liberating was being created, and in circumstances of unrelenting imperialist encirclement and pressure. Not surprisingly, these revolutions had problems and shortcomings and went through twists and turns. And, ultimately, they met defeat by the stronger forces of world capitalism.

Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, has summed up this experience, and drawn from experience more broadly. He has brought forward a new synthesis of communism. It is a deeper, more scientific, and more emancipatory understanding of the methods, goals, strategy and plan for making revolution and for creating a new society that people could flourish in.

I would invite you to get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which is based on this new synthesis. It sets forth how a new socialist society would be constituted and function. You will be able to see how a real socialist economy would be meeting the basic needs of people in a way that did not plunder either the nations of the Third World or the environment. You will be able to see how a planned socialist economy would enable cities to become sustainable, with vibrant “social space,” where work that is meaningful and creative will be connected with people’s sense of community. You will be able to see how such a society would be addressing and tackling the environmental crisis—and only with a socialist system and economy run along the lines described in this document is there even a hope for dealing with the environmental catastrophe generated by capitalism.

Let me conclude with this. Every day that this system, this “horror show,” continues, there is the needless waste of human beings and the crushing of lives and spirits. There is the threat of more wars and the real and growing prospect of environmental collapse. This situation has to be urgently ended. The most dangerous delusional idea” of all is that we can gradually half-step our way out of this.

I welcome your response.

Sincerely,

Raymond Lotta

Do Not Hire Removed!

Peczkis Removed from Do Not Hire List!
By Jim Vail

The Chicago Public Schools agreed to lift the Do Not Hire (DNH) designation on Jan Peczkis, thus restoring his eligibility for employment with CPS.

Peczkis was first featured in the Secondcityteachers news blog when he was fired and placed on the DNH list for allegedly falling asleep in class on a substitute assignment.

It was later determined that this 16 year veteran teacher was diagnosed with sleep apnea, an illness in which people can fall asleep during the day.  Peczkis later underwent treatment and his apnea was later fully corrected.

Peczkis began his fight two years ago when he asked the Chicago Teachers Union to try to get his DNH (do not hire) designation removed. An attorney from the CTU told him that substitute teachers have no rights of grievance, as their hiring or firing is solely an employment decision by CPS. Furthermore, a DNH is simply an employment decision not to hire a particular person in the future. There is nothing in the contract that is being violated, so there cannot be a grievance. However, the CTU agreed to make an informal request on his behalf. The Office of Employee Engagement repeatedly refused the CTU request.

Next, the CTU suggested that he ask school principals to ask that the DNH be removed from his file, based on the idea that CPS is more likely to listen to a principal than the Union. Three principals expressed sympathy, but expressed fear of getting involved. Two did make the request. One was ignored, and the othe was denied with the rather terse statement, "He has been told multiple times that his request is denied." 


He then contacted Second City Teachers after he read about a substitute teacher who was fired for trying to prevent a student from crossing a busy street and possibly saving the kid's life. 

Second City Teachers then agreed to interview him and published his story in last month's issue that generated a lot of reader interest. http://secondcityteachers.blogspot.com/2014/03/dnh.html

I then advised Mr. Peczkis to speak to the Chicago Board of Education about his situation. 

Second City Teachers and Substance News have worked with whistle blowers and teachers unfairly fired over the years and have advised many to take their case to the board of ed. 

Meg Sullivan, who blew the whistle on Aspira Charter School for illegally strip searching female students, was fired. She then contacted Substance where I wrote about her case before she addressed the board of ed. Her story was later picked up by the national press after her lawsuit was filed, forcing newly hired education secretary Arne Duncan to respond to the charter school controversy. Sullivan later settled her whistle blower case with Aspira. 

Peczkis gave a great speech to the board members, concluding, "A teacher who commits a crime should not be allowed to teach in the CPS again; somebody like me with a corrected condition should."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IwnzyGgKDCg#t=1171
(he appears at the 19:30 min. mark)

"I feel wonderful," Peczkis said. "It shows what can happen if you fight for your rights!" 

After earlier this year receiving a letter from the board of ed denying his appeal to have the DNH removed, he received this letter from David Ruhland, director of employee engagement, this week:

"I am writing to advise you that the do not hire designation ("DNH") has been lifted from your file. As a result, I am pleased to inform you that it has been determined that you are eligible to reapply for employment with the Chicago Public Schools." 

Billionaire & Mayor

Revealed: Rahm Emanuel’s top donor bought stock in Marriott just before it was awarded huge Chicago contract

BY DAVID SIROTA AND BEN JORAVSKY
Pando.com

This piece was reported in collaboration with the Chicago Reader. 

On March 5, Chicago’s city council overwhelmingly voted to approve Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to divert $55 million of taxpayer resources into a new privately run hotel in the city’s south loop. Coming just before Emanuel pled poverty to justify his push for pension cuts and property tax increases, the hotel handout was part of the mayor’s expensive development plan that also features a basketball arena for DePaul University.

The vote followed a September decision by the mayor’s appointees on the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority to give Marriott the coveted contract to run the new hotel. The decision by the state-city entity could be a huge financial windfall for Marriott. After all, the company will be running one of America’s largest hotels next to America’s largest convention center – and doing so with massive taxpayer subsidies, but without having to pay to construct the hotel and without having to pay property taxes.

Amid self-congratulatory press releases, what Mayor Emanuel did not mention – and what has gone completely unreported until now – is what a joint investigation by PandoDaily and the Chicago Reader has now confirmed: in the year leading up to Chicago’s lucrative giveaway to Marriott, the hedge fund of one of Emanuel’s largest campaign contributors bought millions of shares of stock in the hotel company.

A billionaire at the intersection of technology, finance and politics

That hedge fund, Citadel Advisors, is run by billionaire Kenneth Griffin, who is reputedly thewealthiest man in Illinois. He made his fortune at the intersection of technology and financial speculation, where his firm’s computers now reportedly process one out of every eight stock tradesmade in the United States. In recent years, he has become famous in the financial world for marshaling computing power to make a killing on the kind of high-frequency trading Michael Lewisinvestigates in his recently published book, “Flash Boys.”

Griffin, though, is not just a financial speculator. He’s also a savvy political investor. At the national level, he was a major fundraiser for Mitt Romney and in February he hosted a fundraiser at his home for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose state domiciles the East Coast stock exchanges that Citadelowns.

In Illinois, Griffin is an equally big political wheeler dealer, having given major campaign contributions to everyone from Mayor Daley to former Governor Rod Blagojevich to investor-turned-gubernatorial-candidate Bruce Rauner. That said, out of all the relationships Citadel has forged with politicians, few appear to be as close as the one the firm has developed with the Chicago mayor behind the Marriott deal.

Over the last three years, Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, have donated more than $200,000to Mayor Emanuel’s campaign. Griffin describes the mayor as his “good friend.” Other Citadel employees have donated about $178,000 to Emanuel’s campaign. Additionally, in December, Emanuel appointed Dan Widawsky, then a top Citadel executive, as the city’s comptroller, overseeing the Department of Finance.

A Timeline of the Marriott Deal & Citadel Stock Purchases 

On February 19, 2013, Mayor Emanuel and Illinois Governor Patrick Quinn (D) announced that the Exposition Authority would be building a giant hotel not far from the McCormick Place convention center. In May of 2013, they announced DePaul would be constructing the basketball arena events center. And on September 13, 2013, the Authority’s board of directors, who are appointed by the mayor and governor, announced that they had chosen Marriott—over Hyatt and Hilton—to run the hotel. According to the Authority’s spokeswoman Mary Kay Marquisos, the board did its due diligence through “a two phase process” of review.

In the months before the development deal was announced, Griffin’s hedge fund was buying up large blocs of Marriott stock. According to SEC filings, Citadel purchased 1.6 million shares of Marriott stock in late 2012. By September of 2013, SEC filings showed the hedge fund owned 2.3 million shares of Marriott. As of the last SEC filings at the end of 2013, Citadel still owned roughly 1.6 million shares of Marriott stock worth an estimated $88 million.

According to Nasdaq figures, Citadel became – and remains – one of the 25 largest institutional owners of Marriott stock.

To give you a sense of the Chicago deal’s potentially huge upside for Marriott and its shareholders, consider some key facts.

This will be a 1,200 room luxury hotel on prime land not far from a huge convention center in the third largest city in America – and it will be right near a new stadium. There’s also the prospect of even more business down the road for the hotel, should the mayor get state approval to put a casinoin the vicinity, as is rumored (Griffin has been a strong opponent of bringing a casino to downtown Chicago).

Among the hotel’s amenities will be a 300-seat restaurant, a roof-top bar, a coffee shop, several banquet rooms, a fitness center and an indoor swimming pool. Best of all, from Marriott’s perspective, someone else is picking up the construction tab—the public. Indeed, with Mayor Emanuel’s subsidies and tax exemptions, Chicagoans property taxes will rise to pay for Marriott’s new crown jewel and to compensate for the property taxes Marriott will not be paying.

Contradicting Griffin’s “Free Market” Ideology

Ironically, Griffin’s hedge fund bought stock in a hotel corporation benefiting from precisely the kind of taxpayer handout that runs counter to Griffin’s stated political ideology.

Remember, this is a guy who promotes himself as a right-of-center free market advocate. To that end, he has financed conservative causes like the charter school movement (he donated $500,000 to Stand for Children); he has given $300,000 to American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s Super PAC; and he has put roughly $1.5 million toward causes backed by the Koch Brothers, the billionaires who have funded efforts to bust unions, roll back environmental protections and defeat President Obama.

In speeches and interviews, Griffin has lashed out at business executives who put the needs of their companies over Illinois, when accepting tax breaks and public subsidies.

“Government being involved in picking winners and losers invariably leads to a loss of economic freedom and encourages corruption,” he told the Tribune last year.

Yet, the taxpayer financed Marriott project is very much one of those deals, directing public resources into a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) scheme that subsidizes a private hotel chain.

Pando and the Chicago Reader contacted Citadel to request Griffin’s comment. After noting that Citadel had acquired Marriott stock, we asked if Griffin had an ideological objection to using public dollars to benefit the hotel corporation. In response, a Citadel spokesperson said via email: “We appreciate the opportunity to contribute to your story but are going to pass at this time.”

The Chicago Mayor’s office did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment from Mayor Emanuel.

How TIFs enrich the already rich

As previously reported by Pando and the Reader, TIF is a program in which Chicago annually diverts roughly $500 million in property taxes–paid in the name of schools, parks, police, etc.–into bank accounts largely controlled by the mayor. The money is supposed to be used to subsidize development in blighted communities that are so poor they would receive no development—but for the TIF.

However, state laws governing TIFs are so riddled with loopholes that Chicago’s mayor is free to spend them virtually wherever and however he wants. That explains why the south loop—a relatively vibrant, well-off community—qualifies for TIF funding in the first place.

Keep in mind–TIFs divert property tax dollars from public schools that are so dead broke many of them can’t afford to buy basic supplies, like toilet paper. Moreover, the mayor is earmarking money to build the Marriott at the very moment he says he has to jack up property taxes and cut payments to pensioners because the city can’t afford to make good on its pension obligations.

In short, the city claims it doesn’t have money for its school children or retirees, but it somehow has plenty of cash to enrich a hotel corporation – one that just so happens to be part owned by the hedge fund of the mayor’s largest contributors.

In his speech last year to the Economic Club of Chicago, Griffin said that Mayor Emanuel should not have only closed 53 schools when he engaged in the largest school closure in Chicago’s history. Griffin insisted that at least 100 schools should have been closed.

If Emanuel’s south loop mega project for Marriott keeps siphoning off more desperately needed property tax dollars from the school system, Griffin may ultimately get his wish.

[illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]