StickWithANose

As I’ve noted previously, the on-going disaster that is the Obama administration’s approach to education reform is little more than a policy push designed to create yet another conduit for the looting of public treasuries. Today’s example comes from the great state of Florida. Take a peek at how the state plans to spend its share of the $1 billion dollars that it requested as part of Arne’s ‘Race to the Top’. [h/t SchoolsMatter]

If the state gets the whole $1.1 billion it asked for (which some say is a very long shot), the Department of Education would spend half and school districts that agreed to take part would share half.

While there are as yet no plans on how individual districts would use their share of the money, the state has suggested to the dollar how it will spend its $570,811,435.

And “contractual” expenditures, including busloads of consultants, would account for $462,815,452.

I’m still looking, but here are a few examples.

To help districts set up new systems to evaluate teachers and administrators — 60 consultants at a cost of $15 million.

To help districts figure out how to compensate teachers and administrators for getting better performance from students, the state plans to contract with 63 financial consultants at a cost of $45 million.

And there is $10.7 million for consultants to develop “lesson study tool kits” so teachers can study “effective lesson development.”

In today’s Slate, Jacob Weisberg lays out the problems facing our nation without candy coating, and it speaks to a subject that is near and dear to my heart. The primary issue facing our nation is, at its root, an educational one.

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn’t want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There’s another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state’s bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya’s), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don’t want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The only thing that I would add to this is that We the People are not only spoiled children, but we are also detached from our larger social reality. Caught up in the vortex of day-to-day life even those who should be the best informed and most active in politics retreat into their own world in which the norms, fads, and movements driving the larger polity remain at a comfortable distance.  The driving force behind this status quo is fragmentation.

The charter school juggernaut is not only an educational failure… It is a failure of civil rights.

While segregation for blacks among all public schools has increased over the last two decades, black students in charters are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. Fully 70 percent of all black charter students attend schools that have student populations that are 90-100 percent racial and ethnic minorities, nearly twice the rate of traditional public schools. Also, more than 40 percent of black charter school students are in schools that have 99-100 percent minority student populations.

It is now official. Obama’s administration has not only adopted Republican education policies as its own, but he has also embraced their methodology for accomplishing its ultimate goal.  There is only one option left for those who value public education as being a public institution immune from corporate looting… Schools Matter:

The only thing remaining for teachers, professors, and others to do is to break out the veal pen and get into the state Houses, the Congressional offices, and into the streets. This will be a fight to the death, and if not, then just death of the profession.

As someone with a background in Cultural Studies, this piece from the BBC hit home for me. Cultural Studies emerged from Birmingham, England in response to the rise of Thatcherism. The central question that occupied the minds of those at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was the question of why it is that poor and working-class voters internalize a politics that undermines their own interests and well-being.  It is a research question that remains salient to this day.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

“It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

Has Obama grown a couple? Or is this just more rhetorical magic lacking in substantive action?

If you’re wondering why President Obama is now adopting a policy position that candidate Obama rightly ridiculed John McCain for you need look no further than the Rubinites advising him. Obama’s supposed spending freeze is but the opening act for the headliner: making significant cuts to social security, medicare and medicaid. NYT

It is the growth in the so-called entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that is the major factor behind projections of unsustainably high deficits, because of rapidly rising health costs and an aging population.

But one administration official said that limiting the much smaller discretionary domestic budget would have symbolic value. That spending includes lawmakers’ earmarks for parochial projects, and only when the public believes such perceived waste is being wrung out will they be willing to consider reductions in popular entitlement programs, the official said.

I am afraid that the Obama administration is becoming nothing more than symbolism wrapped in Republican lite politics. First off, social security is just fine. Raise the cap on social security taxes and what little of problem there is would be resolved. The real problem is medicare/medicaid. However, the best way to address those structural problems is through health care reform, a prospect that now looks to be quite dead. Obama’s corporatist deals with Pharma and the insurance industry and his ceding of control over the health care reform process to the House of Lords doomed any possibility of real health care reform, so now he is adopting the Clinton model by listening to the same tools that advised Clinton after his own health care meltdown.

The lesson being: We can’t fix the structural problems facing our nation, so the costs of resolving our fiscal problems will come out of poor and working people’s asses.

In my morning class, I finished off a series of lectures on the foundation of sociology that focused on the key concepts of Marx, Weber and Durkheim: alienation, the iron cage and anomie respectively. After class, a student approached me with a deceptively simple question for which I had no answer. She explained to me that each of the concepts that we had been discussing has had a significant impact on her saying: “I identify with each of these ideas! I’m living it! And I’m wondering if we’re going to talk about solutions… Are there answers available to us to deal with alienation, rational-based control and anomie?”

It was one of those teaching moments in which you realize that your words have a greater impact than you often realize and that you, the supposedly all knowing teacher with fancy letters attached to your name, are in no position to give that student what s/he needs at that moment. I resorted to explaining that these concepts are best thought of as the “social costs” we pay for this thing we call modern society, but it seemed to be a wholly inadequate answer to the question for both my student and myself. Of course, it is easy to recognize that the question itself is rooted in that time honored tradition of youth: angst. However, it also demonstrates a far more fundamental truth associated with this thing we call angst besides the whinny popular music and brat-pack movies it generates.

The teens and early twenties are a time in people’s lives when the normative understandings passed on to us by our families, churches, schools, etc. run headlong into the empirical realities of a world that is turned upside-down and in contradiction with itself. Pointing out that these disjunctions have been theorized by sociology and the social sciences for over a 150 years comes across to many as an affirmation of the tribulations they’re experiencing in navigating this social milieu, but it offers precious little in the way of how to navigate those tribulations. My student was clearly excited to see her own thoughts and ideas clearly articulated into a theoretical framework that “put the pieces together” into a coherent whole, and she was looking for an equally systematic answer that is, of course, impossible.

I’m not really sure that there is an overall point to this post except to say that there is something lost in the transition into adulthood that we would do well to embrace and hold on to and that is the ability to question the disjunctions of what we [as a society] say is important to us and what we actually do. Perhaps, in the transition to adulthood, we give up a critical element of our humanity that makes self-determinative action and human liberty possible in exchange for inner peace and structure. Perhaps there is an element of de-humanization in this process we innocently refer to as “growing up.”

Now… back to work…

“The great learning [adult study, grinding corn in the head's mortar to fit it for use] takes root in clarifying the way wherein the intelligence increases through the process of looking straight into one’s own heart and acting on the results; it is rooted in watching with affection the way people grow; it is rooted in coming to rest, being at ease in perfect equity.” -Kung

A meditation on living in the Age of Bubbles… Gin & Tacos

Every patriot worth his salt is burying some gold in the yard ahead of the inevitable collapse of the worthless fiat dollar. That Glenn Beck is paid by retail gold outlet Goldline International to hawk gold on the air is no cause for suspicion. That prices have quadrupled in a decade matters not a bit. That anyone buying at these prices stands to lose a fantastic amount of money is irrelevant. When money ceases to exist and gold is the only currency with any value, Uncle Larry and his buried treasure will have the last laugh!

After Beck and doughy pantload served up their own particular view of ‘Liberal Fascism’ this past Friday night, real historians are [at last] pushing back against this tragic re-writing of history. For those who aren’t politically active, this may all appear to be much ado about nothing, however it is deadly serious. The only real defense that a society has against the madness of historical occurrences such as the rise of fascism in the early 20th century is our memory of it. The reason that doughy pantload and Beck are so dangerous is that they are, in effect, erasing our memory of what fascism was while they are constructing a unified ‘other’ to be defined as dangerous to the polity. In short, they are behaving as fascists in the name of stopping what they claim is a rising tide of fascism.

So, for those of you who have friends and family who send you crazy chain mail garbage about the evil left and its fascistic-commie-socialistic agenda to destroy America, you can pass along the following links:

The Scholarly Flaws of Liberal Fascism

The bottom line is that Goldberg wants to attach a defaming epithet to liberals and the left, to “put the brown shirt on [your] opponents,” as he accuses the liberals of doing (p.  392).  He goes about this task with a massive apparatus of scholarly citations and quotations.  But Goldberg’s scholarship is not an even-handed search for understanding, following the best evidence fully and open-mindedly wherever it might lead.  He chooses his scholarly data selectively and sometimes misleadingly in the service of his demonstration.

Jonah Goldberg knows that making the Progressives, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR the creators of an American fascism – indeed the only American fascism, for George Lincoln Rockwell and other overt American fascist or Nazi sympathizers are totally absent from this book – is a stretch, so he has created a new box: Liberal Fascism.  The Progressives and their heirs who wanted to use government to rectify social and economic ills, and who, in Goldberg’s view, thereby created an American Fascism, acted with good intentions, rarely used violence, and had nothing to do with Auschwitz.  Even so, they share an intellectual heredity and a set of common goals with the European fascists.  So they go into the “Liberal Fascist” box.

Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron, of course.  A fascism that means no harm is a contradiction in terms.  Authentic fascists intend to harm those whom they define as the nation’s internal and external enemies.  Someone who doesn’t intend to harm his or her enemies, and who doesn’t relish doing it violently, isn’t really fascist.

An Academic Book - Not!

Even if it purports to be (i.e.  masquerades as) a thoroughly researched ‘alternative’ or ‘secret’ analysis and history of fascism, Liberal Fascism is to the trained eye a patent exercise in propaganda.  Even ‘polemics’ is a euphemism here, implying a provocation to heated debate rather than the attempt to pass off an Ersatz for the real thing.  An example of such propagandistic ‘substitution’ is the Nazi attempt to popularize an anti-Semitic variant of jazz to counter the appeal to young Germans of the ‘degenerate’ U.S. original, resulting in grotesque and deeply unfunny parodies which fooled no genuine jazz lover anywhere in the Reich!

Goldberg’s book perverts historical and historiographical truth with the scarcely hidden agenda (perhaps the real ‘secret’ alluded to unwittingly in the subtitle) of tarring and feathering with negative, anti-democratic, and inhumane connotations a broad current of reformist policy and social justice campaigns which has for decades been a legitimate current of liberalism within U.S. democracy (and not exclusively the Democratic sector of it).  It does so with the blatant aim of making this current guilty (by association) of some of the most heinous crimes ever committed against humanity.  It is a work of sustained pseudo-historical calumny and defamation disguised under the (constantly slipping) carnival mask of an ‘alternative history’.

Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusion

Yet even The Doctrine of Fascism would not be fascism in Goldberg’s hands.  For fascism is not fascism here.  It is anything Goldberg wishes it to be; notably trends in modern American politics and culture that he clearly dislikes.

The Roots of Liberal Fascism: The Book

Fascism, Nazism, Communism, the Roosevelt administration, and the modern Welfare State share degrees of government intervention in the economy.  They are not equivalent, and there is no evidence that government planning leads to totalitarianism any more than drinking tea leads to opium addiction.  This is a classic logical error.  Arendt detailed how it was the totalitarianism shared by Hitler and Stalin that created similarities in terms of ruthless government repression.

There is a problem, then, for Goldberg to adopt outdated and repudiated ideas from the 1930s and 1940s—skip over 50 years of scholarship—and then helicopter in to claim we in the now live under a regime of “liberal fascism.”  Goldberg is not alone in his beliefs, however, as the Tea Party and town hall movement rhetoric demonstrates…

Jonah Goldberg does not list the John Birch Society as a major source, but he should have, since his book is like a compendium of JBS articles published over the last fifty years.  These ideas are now ubiquitous among right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement.  Am I suggesting that Birchers, the Christian Right, and right-wing libertarians have taken over the Republican Party?  Yes, although old-fashioned conservatives and political pragmatists are putting up a splendid fight for control of the Party.  Do I think right-wing TV, radio, and print media are awash with right-wing conspiracy theories pioneered by the Birchers?  Yes, that’s what my research shows.

A younger generation now carries the torch of anti-collectivism forward.  It was young acolytes of right-wing fanatic Lyndon H.  LaRouche, Jr. who created those Town Hall protest placard images of Obama morphed into a Hitler avatar with a little extra mustache and hair.  The irony here is that LaRouche is an actual neofascist who has spent his career calling everyone he despises a fascist.  LaRouche has more pages of content on Wikipedia than most U.S.  Presidents;  and fanatic fans spent years trying to keep the term “fascist” off of LaRouche’s main entry.