While my primary focus on this blog is to highlight education policy and issues related to schooling, I believe it is important to keep the context in which these issues play out in mind. The public looting I identify in the charter school movement is part and parcel with the looting carried out by Wall Street firms and military contractors. The move to tap public treasuries for private profiteering is expanding across the political economy of the U.S., and I see no reason to expect a pull-back any time soon. Likewise, the on-going growth of a corporately-funded knowledge industry tasked with constructing common sense understandings of the socio-political world is the early 21st century version of the political propaganda and yellow journalism that enabled many of the atrocities of the previous century. In short, I would argue that understanding the dynamics of any one issue in contemporary American society demands that you situate it within the totality of relations in which it operates. Unfortunately, the picture that emerges from that perspective is a dire one.

With that in mind, I would encourage you read Ed’s post on how the emergence of Teabaggery in American politics is indicative of a necessary pre-condition for the rise of authoritarian politics.

[I]f we can step outside of the comfort zone of our cushy life of contesting politics in the confines of a liberal democracy, an objective view of this country is pretty scary. I struggle to think of modern democratic state in which the conditions for the success of fascism would be better. I mean, we have it all: simmering racial hatred, extreme xenophobia, sharp class distinctions, a ravaged economy, and the grandiose belief in our own exceptionalism. That thought is simultaneously paranoid and plausible. Watch a Teabagger rally and tell me those people would not fall in line behind the right charismatic fascist leader if given the opportunity. And I don’t mean Tom Tancredo. I mean a real, honest-to-god, working from Hitler’s playbook fascist. Because as the Ground Zero mosque story underscored in yesterday’s post, most Americans don’t believe in rights except for themselves. Sure, we talk about rights a lot, along with freedom, liberty, the Constitution, and all kinds of other high-minded concepts. But when the chips are down, we are willing to deny (other) people rights at the drop of a hat. The cry of the American right quickly changes from “Constitution! First Amendment rights! Freedom of religion!” to “Yeah, but I hate Muslims more than I love any of that stuff.” [...]

Hannah Arendt may have written some of the most important political analysis of the 20th Century when she characterized the post-War analysis of Nazi Germany as “the banality of evil.” The people seated on witness stands were not horned monsters or satanic comic book villains (even if they committed acts that we’d expect from Satan himself). They were your parents, your neighbors, and your dentist. Arendt concluded that just about any person was capable of committing Nazi-style atrocities under the right circumstances. How much urging do you think a crowd of Teabaggers would need to burn down a mosque or start rounding up brown people? It’s like Bill Hicks said about alcoholics – anyone can become one. All it takes is the right bar, the right friends, and the wrong woman.

Jesse offers an equally bleak view from an economic perspective.

The argument that ‘tax cuts for the wealthiest few stimulates growth’ aka the trickle down theory needs to be buried alongside the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ and the other principle beliefs of voodoo economics that have brought the US from the world’s greatest nation to third world status in a generation.

It was the irresponsible tax cuts enacted by Bush II while increasing military spending on two wars, one highly discretionary, along with the increasing financialization of the economy through deregulation, fraud, ‘one way globalization,’ and crony capitalism that have undermined the foundation of the American economy…

Can ‘the many’ continue to borrow to maintain a constant standard of living? Can a democracy be maintained in conditions that start to resemble a third world country? How long before a ’strong man’ rises to take control of the political situation on behalf of the national society of workers? And how long after that would it be before the industrialists and oligarchs lose control of this strong man, as they always seem to do?

Can the US afford to maintain 800 overseas military bases while the domestic tax base continues to erode through a parasitical transferal of wealth from the many to the few based on leverage, speculation, monopoly, asset bubbles and fraud?

Like I said, this is a bleak view of contemporary America, but I would not be so quick to dismiss these perspectives. Viewed in its totality, the nation has a lot of problems, and the majority of “answers” being proffered are built on the ideological framework that got us into this mess in the first place.

Entry Number One:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter. In the past few years we’ve heard all too much about performance enhancing drugs from greenies to tetrahydrogestrinone, and not enough about performance inhibiting drugs. If our evaluation of the records of athletes like Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens, Marion Jones, and Barry Bonds needs to be revised downwards with an asterisk, we submit that that Dock Ellis record deserves a giant exclamation point. Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.

Sadly, the great Dock Ellis died last December at 63. A year before, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, had recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate right hander gave a moment by moment account of June 12, 1970, the day he no-hit the San Diego Padres. Alexander and Ilels original four minute piece appeared March 29, 2008 on NPRs Weekend America. When we stumbled across that piece this past June, Blagden and Isenberg were inspired to create a short animated film around the original audio.

www.nomas-nyc.com

Entry Number Two:

As the man behind some of the most successful McLaren Formula 1 cars and the incomparable McLaren F1 supercar, Gordon Murray has designed some of the fastest cars ever. Now he’s building one of the smallest. And most radical.

The British engineer finally unveiled his T.25 City Car, the Lilliputian runabout he’s spent three years developing. Although the 74-mpg T.25 and its T.27 electric sibling recall the microcars of post-war Europe, it’s quite advanced. Beyond using a tubular steel frame, composite materials and a canopy that opens like a Lamborghini’s doors, the T.25 will use a manufacturing process said to tremendously reduce capital, space and materials.

Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/gordon-murray-t-25/#ixzz0sCoeWRiR

There’s a complicated fight in D.C. right now over how the FCC classifies broadband services, so it can regain the power to impose some basic rules on the industry.

Free-market groups and the industry are banging the table, arguing against the consequences — saying that the FCC is trying to regulate the internet and will kill innovation.

Here’s the simple truth: You don’t want your ISP to innovate.

At least not in the way, they want to “innovate.” [...]

In the last couple of years, ISPs “innovated” by changing how they handle users who type in a URL that doesn’t exist. Under net protocols, the ISP’s DNS servers are supposed to report an error code to your browser in those circumstances. Instead, ISPs are now serving up pages with ads, sometimes in ways that introduce huge security risks…

ISPs also recently dipped their toes into another innovation: Selling access to everything their customers do online in order to build profiles on them and secretly insert targeted ads into other company’s web pages…

What we want and need is fast, reliable and affordable internet access.

The dirty secret of ISPs is that even as broadband usage on their networks continues to increase 30 to 40 percent a year, their annual costs for shipping data onto and off the net’s main pipes continues to fall.

The problem isn’t the cost of shipping data.

The problem is that the large ISPs answer to Wall Street and instead of planning and investing for abundance, they prefer to spend their time thinking of ways to extract more money from customers without having to invest significantly in future-proof infrastructure.

Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk. Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity does not mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience…

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings…

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

74 Democrats signed a joint letter to the FCC supporting internet throttling by Verizon, ATT and Comcast. Throttling lets carriers slow or block internet traffic. This is a clear attack on net neutrality.

Here is where you can do something about it!

Ah Wei has an explanation for Foxconn Technology Group Chairman Terry Gou as to why some of his workers are committing suicide at the company’s factory near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

“Life is meaningless,” said Ah Wei, his fingernails stained black with the dust from the hundreds of mobile phones he has burnished over the course of a 12-hour overnight shift. “Everyday, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here.”

Conversation on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to 10 minutes every two hours and constant noise from the factory washes past his ear plugs, damaging his hearing, Ah Wei said. The company has rejected three requests for a transfer and his monthly salary of 900 yuan ($132) is too meager to send home to his family, said the 21-year-old, who asked that his real name not be used because he is afraid of his managers…

Foxconn’s Longhua complex outside Shenzhen spans three square kilometers (1.16 square miles) and is criss-crossed by tree-lined streets with a water fountain at the center of the facility. Workers wearing polo shirts emblazoned with “Foxconn” in Chinese characters over their hearts walk along the streets. Men wear blue, women wear red. Security personnel wear white. The complex boasts its own hospital, a collection of restaurants and a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees.

The workers, 86 percent of whom are under 25 years old, live in white dormitories with eight to 10 people sleeping in a room. The living quarters have stairs running up the outside walls and the company has begun covering them with nets to prevent people from jumping…

Inside the compound, at a factory devoted to computer motherboards, rows of young men and women stand at assembly lines, their feet shod in blue slippers and white caps on their heads. The smell of solvent hangs in the air. About 80 percent of the front-line production employees work standing up, some for 12 hours a day for six days a week, according to Liu Bin, a 24-year-old employee.

“It’s hard to make friends because you aren’t allowed to chat with your colleagues during work,” Liu said at Shenzhen Kang Ning Hospital where he was seeking help for insomnia. “Most of us have little education and have no skills so we have no choice but to do this kind of job. I feel no sense of achievement and I’ve become a machine.”

The critical issue for a left politics in the early 21st century is how do you make the real costs of an iphone visible?

The suicides at the vast Foxconn plant in Shenzhen ought to shake outsiders. They ought to make them wonder about the human cost to the 420,000 workers who make those nifty iPhones and iPads which so delight savvy westerners. Workers sleep in corporate dormitories, where an ever-shifting population of migrants makes it hard to form friendships, let alone relationships. The basic pay is $130 a month and overtime is essential. Most work 12 hours a day under the eyes of a fanatical management. One man killed himself after supervisors allegedly tore into him for losing a prototype iPhone.

Liu Zhiyi, who went into the plant undercover for a Chinese newspaper, said the lives of workers were mind-numbingly tedious. “As they make the world’s finest gadgets,” he said, “it seems that while they are controlling the machines, the machines also dominating them; the parts gradually come together as they move up the assembly line; at the same time, the workers’ pure and only youth also disappears.” [...]

The employers who feature in the pages of the China Labour Bulletin do a little bit more than turn their workers into assembly line automatons. They set thugs on independent union reps. Since the start of the global recession, there have been ever more cases of employers, including “respected” European companies, cutting rates or just closing factories and running off without paying back wages.

Here we have the workshop of the world, which is also the sweatshop of the world, where even the practices of “good” employers would be unacceptable in the west. And yet the citizens of the world, particularly Europeans, do not care about the use of the one-party state to deliver a rigged market economy in which there is freedom for the rich and authoritarianism for the poor…

For all that, I cannot imagine Stephen Fry stopping his drooling over the iPad – “Just to see this is fantastic!” he burbled as crowds gathered for its launch at the Apple headquarters in London – and showing some common decency by expressing a little concern for Apple’s workers. More to the point, I am not sure that anyone would listen to him if he did. China is too big, too powerful, too impervious to criticism for Europeans to think about. The scale of the Shenzhen plant is beyond our imagination. A boycott of Foxconn’s products would not just mean boycotting Apple, but Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, HP and Dell too. Boycott China and you boycott the computer age, which, despite the crash, effectively means boycotting the 21st century, as we so far understand it…

It would be heartening if people could shake themselves and say that the iPad is just another computer, which we do not need and will not buy unless Apple persuades its suppliers to improve workers’ conditions. Until we do, the hypocrisy of the Chinese communists is our hypocrisy as well.

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