Let the "Why I'm not voting for Obama" #yawnFest begin.

So I'm starting to see the left critique of Obama articles circulate on Facebook.  Most of them are bunk for one simple reason they do not connect the actual problem with an actual solution.

With no mention of  movement building, running for local office, infiltration of politics by human beings in their communities and all fixation on what Leader X, Y, or Z did or didn't over the past 4 years is simply setting up an equation that says "I need a better master." Rather than the more appropriate--> we need to be running things better and I have to be a part of that equation.  

We need to be doing it ourselves; rather than waiting for permission from on high.  We need to be working to build political power locally that can undermine the 1% and those who do their bidding at the local level.  These things remains true no matter who you decide to vote for on the least important/impactful question you will be offered on your ballot no matter where you live this coming November.

We have systemic challenges and they require systemic reforms to fix the issue--who you vote for will not address the actual problems our democracy face.

When I ran for State Senate in 2010 I put a big priority putting a spotlight on implementing Instant Run Off Voting here in Georgia for a reason--it ends the lesser of two evils phenomena.  It was a systemic reform that would address a poor outcome our current process is creating. The "vote for better people" argument is a cop-out.

***Full Disclosure on the trivially small act of voting***

Here is my heuristic on voting for President. 

Let me be clear that this is just my take, that I have and will continue to use in the future; and not a judgement on others who may look at their local situation in a different manner.  Far too much energy is focused on Presidential votes, which have the least impact so I'm not looking to get into an online battle over the tactics of how I spend my 30min's on a Tuesday in November every 4 years in the least important (read: my vote has the least impact on the outcome) question on my ballot. 

My rule of thumb, If you live in a state that experts consider a toss up; that will be purely won or lost on GOTV efforts--vote lesser of two evils as there is too much at stake to empower GOP'ers in Congress.  If you live in a state that is clearly going one way or the other vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein and quickly move on to the more important down ballot races.  

If you don't have a "choice" in one of those down ballot races you may have found the perfect place to insert your name into two/four years from now.  As we need more political actors in this world and fewer "voters."

I'm only posting/tweeting this once and moving on to more important issues or else @EricTheTeamster will come beat me up.

To my friends who are passionate about winning over people to your "not voting for Obama" platform:  Rather than spending a lot of time bashing Obama why not identify some local politician who will introduce IRV in your state so that we don't have to deal with this issue ever four years...

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Friedrich Hayek

Here.

Marx on the schoolmaster as a productive worker

 Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is,

by its very essence, the production of surplus- value. . . . If we may take

an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster

is a productive worker when, in addition to belabouring the heads

of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the

school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead

of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation.

—Karl Marx, Capital

updates on #CTUstrike and some labor history/context

First, Sign this petition in support of Walmart-contracted Warehouse Workers who just went on Strike for Safer Working Conditions

Also go "Like" the Chicago Teachers Union Facebook Page if you support their struggle! 

Here are some important links on the Chicago Teachers strike:

Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are wrong about teacher evaluation 

Saving the Chicago public school system: Who's hurting the kids? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English 

Chicago School Strike: The Failure of Charter Schools 

Editorial: Rahm is wrong about the Boston teachers union contract - Chicago Sun-Times

Why did American teachers unionize? What does feminism have to do with it?  

 Lean Production: What’s Really Hurting Public Education | Jacobin 

Advice for Chicago: Industrial History Shows Value of Collaboration « Diane Ravitch's blog 

Why do so many liberals hate teachers’ unions? « LBO News from Doug Henwood 

Liberals and Teachers: An “Examination on the Merits” | Jacobin 

Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers. « Corey Robin 

Chicago teachers strike against corporate education interests and for better schools for kids. Guess which side the Waltons are on? | Jobs With Justice 

Good Backgrounder:

How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books 

Also, be sure to watch Chris Hedge's Democracy Now interview where he notes two really important points

1) This is the Most Important Labor Action in Decades

2) This strike parallels the #occupy movement and is part of the fight back against the 1%  

And I included a great Doug Henwood chart in this post just to remind us that the decline in labor action is intrinsically linked to the decline in "the middle class" over the past 30 years.

Austerity matters; resource starved schools can't educate... Where does Obama stand?

This strike, truly in the end, boils down to class and the impacts of austerity on the poor and working class--but its playing out along a wages and benefits narrative.  But, facts are facts, and resource starved schools can't educate their students. 

Appears school officials prepared a how-to guide explaining to the nonteacher fill in's a few days before the strike (guess they saw it coming) on what to expect...

A few days before the strike began, school officials distributed a "how-to guide" to hundreds of non-teachers who are using to staffing the more than 140 schools serving as "drop-off" centers during the strike. The guide is a tacit admission by CPS of how horrible conditions are at many Chicago schools.

According to the guide, those staffing schools should "wear a watch--your room may not have a functioning clock." Dress comfortably, too, because "many schools are NOT air-conditioned." Bring 30 sharpened pencils, 30 pens and a pencil sharpener. Also, "you will need to bring your own breakfast and lunch. Please note that you cannot rely on access to refrigerators or microwaves."

This won't come as news to a supposedly pampered Chicago teachers. In one radio interview, strikers described classroom temperatures that regularly hit triple digits during the hot months at the beginning and end of the school year. One teacher said she stocked her classroom with a dozen ice packs--which she purchased herself--to treat heat exhaustion among her students.

Yet Rahm and CPS officials insist that teachers are responsible for poor performance among Chicago's students. Not only does this shift attention away from the city's unwillingness to provide decent facilities or hire enough teachers to bring down class sizes, but it is also an attempt to blame teachers for the crisis gripping the U.S. public school system, from coast to coast.

Teachers can't be expected to overcome the problems of hunger facing their students. They can't address the fact that poor kids don't have computers at home or even a good place to do their homework in some cases. And, of course, teachers can't overcome the fact that so many parents, overworked and underpaid themselves in their own jobs, don't have the time and energy to help children with homework.

On the first day of the strike, Rahm and the rest of the CPS bureaucracy repeatedly took to the airwaves to flog the idea that a strike is "unnecessary" because only a couple issues remain as sticking points in negotiations. "Finish it for our children," Emanuel said, playing to the TV cameras. "Two issues: an evaluation system designed by teachers, for teachers, revised by teachers [and] a system in which the local principal picks the most qualified teacher to teach."

David Dayen connects the dots As Paul Ryan Lines Up Behind Rahm, the Scheme to Privatize Chicago Schools Becomes Clear

I think the most important by-product of this strike is that it will show how deeply embedded the Students First/Waiting for Superman frame has become, in the traditional media, in the cultural firmament among elites, and in the Democratic Party. I’ve heard people on social media wondering what this strike is about. Narrowly speaking, Chicago teachers aren’t supposed to be able to strike over anything but pay and benefits. And certainly, they’re trying to retain their health care. But it’s not that hard to see what this is about. Significant sections of the Chicago Public Schools system are starved for funds. They are putting 40-50 students in classrooms without air conditioning. The kids don’t have books or materials weeks into the term. And ultimately, the goal is to make those schools so poorly maintained, staffed and administered that they “fail,” allowing Rahm Emanuel and his hedge fund buddies to essentially privatize them:

What we’re seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman’s hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the “clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats,” political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It’s a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike.

It’s not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions. Emanuel’s political allies have been caught paying protesters to show up at hearings on school closures. Every story you read about the greedy teachers (greedy? does that description fit the teachers you know?) has years of big money anti-teacher campaigning behind it, pushing us to believe that teachers, who bring work home every night and routinely spend their own money on school supplies and even food for their students, are overpaid, selfish, lazy. Now, all those narratives that the right wing has built up—anti-union narratives coming together with pro-privatization narratives—are being used against Chicago’s teachers.

Privatizing the services of public schools, or the entire schools themselves, has become big business. If it takes a standardized test to force that into being, if that becomes the data that “proves” the need for privatization, that’s what will get used.

It will be important for the teachers not to get distracted by the forces arrayed against them. This liar floated that they asked for a 35% raise, a complete fabrication made doubly disingenuous by the fact that the management figure of 16% is off by almost a factor of 2.

So far, the public, which gathered in excess of 50,000 by some accounts last night at a CTU rally, is supporting the teachers, and not buying the narrative swallowed whole by the elites. We’ll have to see if that continues.

Obama's poll numbers will start to hurt at some point from all the "When you agree with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney--its a sign you need to reevaluate" and he either stays silent or openly sides with the 1% agenda of corporatization.

I just want to go back to what Dean Baker noted earlier.  Something doesn't fly in Rahm's story--
Did Education Secretary Arne Duncan Really Leave Chicago Schools a Mess?

Class matters; especially when it comes to class time endeavors...

In response to my post Corporatization of our schools just hit a road block...  this morning I saw this comment on Facebook:

I am not sure where the profit making machines for the 1% comes from. This would be better served not connecting the issue with the "Rich"

I think this is great example of how class becomes embedded into our debates and discussions in a way where must people don't even; and others don't want us to look cause class always makes for uncomfortable discussions.

People don't really realize the big money pushing for reforms behind the scenes.

As Brian Leiter noted this is an issue neckdeep in challenges/questions of class--who is getting resources and how they are being distributed:

There is only one problem confronting urban public schools, and it has nothing to do with the schools or the teachers, contrary to all the blather by idle-rich busybodies and the intellectually feeble politicans who do their bidding.  The primary problem with urban public schools is that they largely serve a population that lives under conditions of economic hardship, sometimes grotesque economic hardship, with all the attendant problems of poor nutrition, physical safety, availability of adult supervision after school, and suitable environments and incentives for school work.  That, of course, is why suburban public schools in affluent communities--with unionized teachers who are no different than those in the urban schools--always do better on measures of academic performance and outcomes.  If you don't have to worry whether there will be food for dinner, or whether you will be mugged, or if anyone will be available to take care of you, or whether you'll have a quiet place to work, it turns out to be easier to do well in school.  It's got nothing to do with the teachers, and everything to do with the environment.  (Here and there, fabulous teaching makes a difference, but you can't make policy around atypical cases.)  

Of course, it would be hard to generate enthusiasm among hedge-fund billionaire busy-bodies for doing something about the economic environment in which the victims live, so instead we have the absurd idea that if only the teachers were better, everything would be dandy, as well as the destructive idea that to make the teachers better, we need to measure their performance based on standardized test results.  (That idea, by the way, started with George W. Bush when he was Governor of Texas, and it successfully destroyed the public schools, as the curriculum devolved into "teaching to the test," rather than teaching.)

Rahm Emanuel's kids attend the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where 99% of the kids go on to college (and about 50% go on to what would be generally considered highly selective or "elite" colleges and universities).  There are some very good teachers at "Lab," and some not so good ones.  But no one ever dreams of suggesting that to be even better, those teachers should be paid according to standardized test results.  Lab School is successful for simple reasons:  it has resources and it has good students, half of whom come from academic families and the other half from with families with resources to support them (even if they aren't so good!).  The resources support a good curriculum, a well-compensated teaching staff, arts, enrichment programs, after-school activities, and more.   No one ever suggests we should "stop throwing money" at the school, that what "Lab" really needs is teachers whose students get higher test scores.  But this bullshit and blather is standard fare when it comes to the public schools.

Diane Ravitch over at her excellent education blog gives a run down of what Rahm really wants:

The real difference between the CTU and Mayor Rahm Emanuel is not money. By all accounts, the union and the mayor are close on compensation.

The real differences are about the corporate reform agenda. The mayor wants merit pay, more charters, evaluation of teachers by test scores, and all the other components of the national corporate reform agenda.

But little noticed by the national media is that none of these so-called reforms works or has any evidence to support it. Merit pay has failed wherever it was tried. Teacher evaluation by student test scores is opposed by the majority of researchers, and practical experience with it has led to confusion and uncertainty about whether student scores can identify the best and worst teachers. The charters in Chicago and elsewhere do not get better test scores than the regular public schools. Even in Detroit, only 6 of 25 charter high schools got better scores than the much-lamented Detroit public schools.

Valerie Strauss gives a good run down on the unproven nature of Emanuel's agenda:

Reformers like Emanuel want to use as a key measure of principal and teacher evaluation the standardized test scores of students, but assessment experts across the country say these tests aren’t designed for this purpose and that it is an invalid evaluation tool.

A number of states have passed laws requiring that test scores be used in evaluation in varying degrees, but Emanuel is at the upper edge with his plan to have the testing ultimately make up half of an educator's evaluation.

In fact, Emanuel received an open letter earlier this year from scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area saying this about test-based evaluation system for educators:

...The new evaluation system for teachers and principals centers on misconceptions about student growth, with potentially negative impact on the education of Chicago’s children. We believe it is our ethical obligation to raise awareness about how the proposed changes not only lack a sound research basis, but in some instances, have already proven to be harmful...

You can read the entire letter here

A major report by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, reported last year that:

The standardized test scores that have been trumpeted to show improvement in the schools provide limited information about the causes of improvements or variability in student performance.This would be true, presumably, for any school system that use standardized tests as a measure of achievement.

This hasn’t stopped the fabulously wealthy Gates Foundation from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pilot evaluation systems that include test scores. Gates is a brilliant man but on school reform he is no expert. Unfortunately, he has an outsized say in the direction of reform because he can fund whatever he wants to. (The same holds true for other billionaires with school reform agendas that don’t stand up to the evidence.)

Some of the country’s best school systems use multiple measures to evaluate teachers that don’t include test scores, and they work just fine. Here’s one great post on how to do evaluation the right way.

Merit pay, or performance pay, is just what it sounds like — giving more money to educators for doing a great job. But the idea that offering more money will provide an incentive for teachers and principals to do a better job doesn’t actually work in the real world.

In fact, it’s been tried over and over since the 1920s, according to education historian Diane Ravitch, and failed every single time. The most comprehensive trial of teacher merit pay, conducted by economists at Vanderbilt University’s National Center for Performance Incentives, discovered that merit pay made no difference.Why? Teachers would like to make more money but most still work as hard as they can whether they get a bonus for it or not.

Besides, teachers also know that competing for bonus money destroys cooperation that is critical to a good teaching environment in a school, and most important, how “merit” is determined is not simple if you want to be fair.

There have recently been some studies on “loss aversion” — a psychological finding that losing something makes us feel worse than gaining the same thing makes us feel better — works to help incentivize teachers to do their best works. The studies are nonsense, as you can see here.

You may have read about some recent studies that show merit pay does work. Be careful to check methodology when you look at study results and whether the people who did them had a vested interest in the outcome.

More on the Caucus of Rank and File Educators and Karen Jennings Lewis

Doug Henwood tweeted this short video on emergence of dissidents in CTU, which now runs the union:

I listened to it on the way up to school and I have to say this group of teachers sound like they have their act together.  I hope unions and occupy activists across the country are taking notes.

Here is more on the back story on Karen Jennings Lewis:

With two master’s degrees, she’s had an over-20 year career in Chicago’s schools. Her last job was teaching chemistry in one of Chicago’s “select” eight high schools. But the way Chicago schools were going caused her deep alarm. She and others began CORE—the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, and Lewis became its co-chair.

“The Caucus of Rank and File Educators was formed in response to the failure of the old union,” she says. “We thought the old union had not mounted adequate resistance” to the so-called reforms of former Mayor Daley and former school superintendent Arne Duncan (now Obama’s education secretary). These included privatizing schools, promoting charter schools, and codifying standardized tests for all children—thus eliminating critical thinking, analysis, and creativity, decimating unions, and undermining schools in poor Latino and African-American communities with the aim of closing them down.

So Lewis ran for the head of the teachers’ union and in June 2010, she won.

“If you thought Chicago Public Schools were bad back then,” she says, “let me tell you, today they are dreadful. Worse than ever.”

Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel is following up on the Daley and Duncan strategy. Emanuel’s first order of business was to put a longer day on the agenda—an hour and a half longer—without the necessary teachers to provide educational work, without a valid education plan or compensation for teachers’ salaries.

Other critical issues are being fought by the union--issues that do not get much of a hearing in Chicago’s press. These include unworkable class sizes; inadequate staffing for a fully functional school; an absence of social workers to serve deeply needy kids; the destruction of art, music, foreign language, and physical education programs; the purging of experienced teachers; no books on some library shelves; inadequate playgrounds; no air conditioners in many classrooms, making learning impossible.

“It’s about equal access for all,” she says. “The political leaders do not understand the nature of public education. How long have the schools been under-resourced?”

She also understands that corporate America is behind the push to privatize the schools and impose standardized testing.

“We’re fighting big business,” she says. “They want to control the population. They need a permanent underclass to do the available jobs for less pay. They want a compliant, unquestioning work force. They want a volunteer army. They want to terrorize people: ‘Be quiet and don’t complain.’ No critical thinkers here. It’s all about obedience.”

For more check out:
Dean Baker: Did Education Secretary Arne Duncan Really Leave Chicago Schools a Mess?
Brian Leiter: Chicago Teachers' Strike

As well as my earlier wrap up of links.

Corporatization of our schools just hit a road block...

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Dole's 1996 speech, McCain's 2008 speech both drew higher ratings than Romney

There was the chair thing.  But all in all this GOP convention was a flop for Mitt.  Josh Marshall has the break down.

Financial crisis: Why not to expect recovery anytime soon

Over at The Economist blog Free Exchange we're reminded that recessions built off of bubble's take a long time to recover from:

To understand the effects of an economic crisis, you have to go back to its roots. A new study  by Alan Taylor draws attention back to the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. Through a series of tests run on a sample of 14 advanced economies between 1870 and 2008, Mr Taylor establishes a link between the growth of private sector credit and the likelihood of financial crisis. The link between crisis and credit is stronger than between crises and growth in the broad money supply, the current account deficit, or an increase in public debt.

Over the 138-year timeframe Mr Taylor finds crisis preceded by the development of excess credit, as in Ireland and Spain today, are more common than crisis underpinned by excessive government borrowing, like in Greece. Fiscal strains in themselves do not tend to result in financial crisis.

When the boom period of credit expansion is coupled with growth in public sector borrowing, however, the subsequent negative impact on the economy will be worse. Why? When a crash occurs, governments will not have the fiscal capacity to buffer the crisis due to their already stretched borrowing levels. Instead, they become forced to retrench and adopt austerity measures—which tend to drag on growth further, prolonging recession.

Whats in a chair; or, not in a chair, as the case may be.

So, this whole Clint Eastwood talking at a chair thing has gone big.  The single biggest retweet from the Republican National Convention was from Barrack Obama responding to Clint Eastwood

This seat's taken. OFA.BO/c2gbfi, twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 31, 2012

 

Its everywhere.

So much so that Doug Henwood cry's "enough already!!"

Ok, how many jokes can you make about an empty chair?

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) September 2, 2012

 

Corey Robin agrees

@doughenwood Apparently, very very many. It's almost as tedious as the event itself. Can't you make it stop?

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) September 2, 2012

 

@davidkaib @doughenwood I wonder if people realize how silly they sound. The whole thing is worthy of nothing more than...nothing.

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) September 2, 2012

But the chair bit isn't going to go away and here's why.  

Jamelle Bouie put it quite succinctly on Twitter, “This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.”  

But I'd extend that to this being the perfect representation of the past four years--Republicans I know and deal with day in and day out yelling about an imaginary Barack Obama who doesn't actually exist. 

I had to campaign for State Senate in 2010 with imaginary Barack Obama everywhere I went.  It was absurd, the amount of time wasted at events, in conversations, untangling reality from utter nonsense.   

Rather than talk about the Eisenhower "pragmatist" currently occupying the White House many of us on the ground have had to deal with concerns, and honest to God, fears, about the radical left wing socialist trying to undermine the American way of life.

Imaginary Barack Obama resonates with people, and he resonates with people who have been actively involved in politics on the ground across this country, for a very good reason--we've had to put up with him for a long time.

It just took Clint Eastwood, standing up on stage at the RNC, giving a shoddy rendition of some old vaudeville routine, to bring him to life for the rest of you.

I, for one, am glad imaginary Obama finally has a seat at the table in our collective discourse--cause he's been here all along.

Yes, Corey, its nothing more than nothing; and its taken up a massive amount of my time and energy over the past 4 years.

Now then, now that we've talked about nothing in this post lets end it by talking about things like raising the minimum wage, expansion of paid sick days for all Americans, and how Democrats are the party of austerity now a days.

Every 2008 presidential candidate proposed a stimulus plan--Mitt Romney's was the biggest proposal from either party!!

Was rereading Michael Grunwald's #mustread piece in Foreign Policy Think Again: Obama's New Deal and I was struck by two things early in the article:

 The economy shrank at a Depression-level rate in the fourth quarter of 2008, and job losses peaked in January 2009. After the stimulus bill passed in February, however, output had its second-biggest quarterly improvement in 25 years, and employment had its biggest quarterly improvement in 30 years. The recession officially ended that June. A Washington Postreview of Recovery Act studies found six that showed a positive economic effect versus one useful study (by prominent Republican economist John B. Taylor) that concluded the stimulus failed -- and critics noted that Taylor's data just as easily support the conclusion that the stimulus was too small.

Keynesian stimulus has since become a political football, but before Obama took office, just about everyone agreed that when the economy slumps, government can boost growth and create jobs by injecting money into the economy, whether by taxing less or spending more. In early 2008, every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate proposed a stimulus plan -- in fact, Romney's was the largest. And Republicans still use Keynesian pump-priming arguments to push tax cuts, military spending, and other stimulus they happen to support. Of course, the most powerful argument for aggressive stimulus has been the experience of European countries like Britain and Spain that have turned back toward austerity and stumbled back into recession.

First, I hadn't caught it before, but he points out that Mitt Romney's stimulus proposal in 2008 was the largest of any Presidential candidate running in 2008!  My assumption is that it was top heavy with tax cuts so there probably wasn't as much bang for the buck as one would want out of a stimulus; but still its so amazing to watch "Post-Truth campaign 2012" as Mitt Romney runs away from pretty much everything he's ever believed in.

Second, the positive impact of the stimulus on the economy is extremely clear to mainstream economists of all political persuasions, who are these Republicans that actually think the stimulus hurt our economy?  Who think that the Obama stimulus was some kind of radical socialist scheme? I mean seriously, we are talking pretty low caliber on the intellectual totem pole to mistake an Eisenhower center-right pragmatist for a radical left wing redistributionist!  I know one should not have high expectations of voters--most don't pay much attention to politics and policy; and I also know that people don't vote on policy (they don't even vote via the use of reasoning) but still I can't help but wonder who are these Republicans and how in the world do they get their information about the world?  

We truly live at a time of cultural crisis when a massive swath of the electorate is not only buying into blatant lies but is passionately disregarding basic facts with pride.