The Rouge Forum

Call for Papers: Policy Futures in Education

2010-04-10T17:14:00.001-04:00

Good Morning,

1. CALL FOR PAPERS

Policy Futures in Education

Editors
Michael A. Peters, mpet001@uiuc.edu
Huseyin Esen, esen1@uiuc.edu

Education and Scenarios for a Post-Occidental World

There has been much talk of the ‘post-American world’, the ‘end of
history’, the ‘triumph of the West’, the rise of China or a
multipolar, pluralistic world dominated by continental politics, the
rise of the BRICs and changing global power dynamics. Each one of
these scenarios has serious implications for education, the world’s
education systems, the architecture of educational institutions and
the roles that education as an institution plays locally, nationally,
regionally and globally. This is a speculative special issue designed
to provide a preliminary investigation of these historical scenarios
with a special emphasis on education—its role and trajectory.
Contributors are requested to confine themselves to 5,000 words
(including references) and to provide an argument that embraces one or
more of the following themes limiting themselves to a schematic and
programmatic statement that provides only an outline of their ideas.

1. End of Hegemony: The Rise of Asia, Multipolarity and the
Post-American, Post-European World

2. New Europe: Fortress Europe(?), Rejuvenation and the Question of
"Europeanness"

3. China Inc: Chimerica, The Beijing Consensus, and the End of Neoliberalism

4. Globalization 2.0: The Cultural Economy, Hybridization, and Multi-modernities

5. After History: Collapse of Soviet Russia, End of History, Triumph
of Liberalism

Please signal your intent and expression of interest by sending the
lead editor (mpet001@illinois.edu) a title and abstract as soon as
possible. Deadline for manuscripts is end of September, 2010. The
special issue will be published in late 2011 or early 2012.

Say Anything?

2010-03-24T09:51:00.002-04:00

I work with graduate students and when it comes to picking research topics, they tend to go for things related to standardized testing. It's a mania. At this point, I could develop a drinking game for every time I see the following words or phrases: "student achievement," "benchmarks," "NCLB," "AYP," "gain scores," "professional learning communities," "data driven (insert education activity here)" and so on. It's like if it doesn't involve test scores, it's somehow not "real" research. Yet only when we get away from testing do we begin to deal with what is real!

The other day I noticed that the film Say Anything was on T.V., and there's a great speech that Lloyd, the main character, makes when he's asked at dinner what career path he wants to take. The original monologue goes like this:

"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

Getting inspired by all this "test talk" that permeates anything related to education, crowding out the conversations we SHOULD be having about why things have to be this way to begin with, I took Lloyd's quote and updated it for us teachers:

"I don't want to direct instruct anyone, do research on student achievement based on test scores, or teach to the test as a career. I don't want to direct instruct from anything aligned to the standards or tested, or test anyone who has been direct instructed, or research standards-aligned curricula for effectiveness, or remediate anyone who has been tested, direct instructed, or subjected to aligned curriculum based on raising test scores. You know, as a teacher, I don't want to do that."

So for all those professors out there who are armpit deep into reviewing research drafts, my hat goes off to you! Stay untested, my friend.

Rouge Forum Conference 2010: Call for Proposals

2010-01-31T16:18:00.002-05:00

ROUGE FORUM CONFERENCE, 2010:
CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Education in the Public Interest: Teaching and Learning for a Democratic Society

RF 2010 will be hosted at George Williams College on the scenic banks of Geneva Lake. Located officially in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, the college is nestled between the major metropolitan areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois. The conference will be held August 2-5.

Bringing together academic presentations and performances (from some of the most prominent voices for democratic, critical, and/or revolutionary pedagogy), panel discussions, community-building, and cultural events, this action-oriented conference will center on questions such as:

1. Transforming the notion of “saving public education” to one of creating education in the public interest, what does teaching and learning for a democratic society look like?
2. What does education for liberation look like compared to the more socially reproductive/dominating education we see in many of our nation’s schools?
3. Are the current crises in the economy as well as educationally in such states as California or cities like Detroit indicative of a turning point in history? Has the rightward shift ebbed or will the economic crisis push the ruling class towards fascism?
4. What is a public good? Is education a public good? Why is it treated as a private good?
5. Is climate change a matter to be debated by governments and industry leaders? Has the public participated in the debate on climate change? What roles do educators have in making students aware of the implications of that debate?
6. Are multi-trillion dollar deficits public ‘bads’?
7. What debts will future generations, including the students we may teach, carry because our financial, governmental, and military endeavors have not been concerned with public goods?
8. What are the educational implications of the recent Supreme Court decision to endow corporations with the right of free speech?
9. How do we learn and teach to get from where we are to where we need to be?
10. How do we stand up for the correctness of our ideas?
11. How does change happen (individually, within a school, within a district)?
12. Can the current system be reformed in order to better serve children, families, and citizens?
13. If not, what would a new system look like? How would it be implemented? What past models exist on which to work and build?

To learn more about the conference, please contact any of our conference organizers:

Faith Wilson (fwilson@aurora.edu)
Adam Renner (mailto:arenner@bellarmine.edu?subject=Rouge%20Forum%20Conference%202008)
Wayne Ross (wayne.ross@ubc.ca)
Rich Gibson (rgibson@pipeline.com)
Gina Stiens (mailto:stiensg@yahoo.com?subject=Rouge%20Forum%20Conference%202008)
Doug Selwyn (dselw001@plattsburgh.edu)
Joe Cronin (jcronin@antioch.edu)

Or visit the conference website at: http://www.rougeforumconference.org/.

Submissions
Proposals for papers, panels, or performances should include title(s), no more than a 500 word description, and names and contact information for presenter(s). Presenters should plan on 45 minute time slots to deliver papers. Panels and performances will be awarded 90 minutes.

Review of Paper and Panel Proposals treating any of the above questions will begin April 15, 2010. Please send your proposals to Faith Wilson (fwilson@aurora.edu). As we expect a number of proposals for a limited number of slots please forward your proposal as soon as possible.

Performance Proposals should also be forwarded to Faith Wilson (fwilson@aurora.edu) by April 15, 2010. Please describe your art/performance and how it may relate to the conference topic/questions.

Critical Education inaugural issue

2010-01-19T20:33:00.004-05:00

The Editorial Team of Critical Education is pleased to launch the inaugural issue of the journal.

Click on the current issue link at the top of the home page or the abstract and article links at the bottom of the page) to read "The Idiocy of Policy: The Anti-Democratic Curriculum of High-stakes Testing" by Wayne Au.

Au is assistant professor of education at Cal State University, Fullerton and author of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality (Routledge, 2009).

To recieve notification of new content in Critical Education, sign up as a journal user (reader, reviewer, or author).

Look for the initial installments of the special section edited by Abraham DeLeon titled "The Lure of the Animal: Addressing Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research" in the coming weeks.

criticaleducation.org

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2010-01-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

Get the latest: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=122

Call for papers: Rouge Forum News, Issue 16

2010-01-10T17:13:00.001-05:00

Rouge Forum News, Issue 16—Call for papers—Deadline: April 1

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 16 feature articles will be focused on experiences with, pictures of, research regarding, and stories on PROTEST and RESISTANCE. Given the upcoming march in California on March 4, 2010 and the occupation of businesses (Republic Window) and schools (the New School in NY and several in the California system) over the last year plus, we invite your essays, poetry, photos and art that surrounds the theme of protest and resistance.

Along with these feature articles, we invite, as usual, other essays that treat the links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

Review a book, talk about what lessons have worked in your school lately, play with theory, critique theory, give us some highlights on your research, write a poem, etc.

We are interested in work from academics, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools --- writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry.

You can submit material for the RF News via email (text attachment, if possible) to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu. PLEASE SUBMIT BY APRIL1, 2010.

The end of a dire decade: A happy new year wish and a rouge forum update

2009-12-31T14:36:00.003-05:00

Friends.

The latest RF News is here.

For the latest Rouge Forum Update from Rich: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=107. Here is a nice preface to Rich's latest update:

In mid- 2001, we wrote, “This is the seiche time...From time to time in the St. Clair River, which runs rapidly along the eastern coast of Michigan connecting Lake Huron with Lake St. Clair, a combination of high winds and atmospheric pressure causes the river to split apart, leaving a wet marsh between an onrushing tide of water headed south, and a trailing wave of great power. The locals call this a seiche, and the long moments that pass as the broken water surges to connect with itself, usually accompanied by dark purple skies, they call the seiche time.”September 11, 2001 followed.Four years earlier, we argued that schools were even then the centripetal organizing point of de-industrialized North American life (and elsewhere too), that the struggles in schools would mesh ideology and money; sometimes colliding, other times in a perfect marriage.

We said any society engaged in militarism, imperialism, tied to a consumer economy, would surely move to greater control over what citizens know and how they come to know it. Schools would be key.

In schools, we said that six thrusts from elites would come into play:
1. Regimented national curricula (we used the history standards as a model).
2. Anti-working class, racist, high-stakes tests.
3. Merit pay linked to the tests.
4. More militarism.
5. Some privatization.
6. A full blown assault on educators’ wages and benefits.

We argued that the traditional unions and professional organizations would be worse than useless in meeting these attacks as their leaders are flatly on the other side of what is a class(room) war.

We said “an injury to one will proceed an injury to all.” It has, as we indicated, urban districts serving especially exploited populations and rural districts would be hit first, but middle class districts would follow–then even some of the richer public schools would be hit.

We insisted for nine years that a consumer society that has a vanishing productive base, a society rooted in spectacles, massive internal and external borrowing, and financial shenanigans was built on sand–and that the sky would fall.

It did.

For a decade, we built school resistance around, mostly, research and action aimed at the high-stakes exams with some success in both wealthy and poor districts while most middle class district school workers muddled along.

In early 2008, we expressed sympathy for those who would vote Democratic, but suggested that relying on Democrats to make fundamental change demonstrated a key misunderstanding of the relationship of capitalism and democracy, the former then trumping democracy at every turn.

We insisted that “capitalism has to be named.” We said, “The core issue of our time is the rapid rise of color-coded social and economic inequality and the promise of perpetual war, challenged by the potential of mass, class-conscious, resistance.”

Over more than a decade, our conferences and our resources became community and comfort to educators who often felt isolated in this onslaught. We claim no special foresight. What is most surprising to us is that in North America the Rouge Forum stands alone as an organized group of people who recognize that what is afoot is an education agenda as a war agenda, a class war agenda, and who seek to construct reason, connected to power, in order to not only push back, but transform our own lives and our society.

The Rouge Forum transcends the divisions of academic and social labor, rather than recreating them as do unions and the “professional” organizations. We include doctors, professors, k12 educators, support personnel, social workers, media specialists, librarians, parents, two principals, truck drivers, custodians, secretaries, retirees, stadium workers, construction workers, unemployed people, soldiers, union staffers, that is, people from all over world, the US to India to England to Grenada to South Africa.

The Rouge Forum News, our Broadsides, videos, and other publications reflect that unity–and our varying critiques of why things are as they are. We close a horrific decade begun and ended with war heaped upon war—battles where the children of the poor kill other children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands. We witnessed the greatest theft of wealth in the history of the world, the $12.9 trillion Tarp bank bailout (no strings) and the takeover of the auto industry by the federal government, finalizing what can only be seen as a corporate state.

On the near horizon, we suspect the Democrats will tax the existing health insurance of those who have jobs, dump GM, Chrysler, and Walmart employees into a debased pool of the barely insured, and let the rich off the hook once again.

What is ahead? Surely more wars, intensifying as imperial rivalries grow. China, Russia, Japan, and Europe all desperately need that oil, that cheap labor, that copper, those markets, the pipelines, and those shipping lanes. The wars will come home in the economy and daily life. Our crystal ball isn’t clear enough to predict deflation, inflation, or devaluation, but the throw of the dice says rampant inflation. In daily life, the assaults on reason and well being in schools will necessarily sharpen as will political repression, often disguised as protection of the citizenry. If resistance is not successful, all educators could become traveling adjuncts.

We have said persistently that people will fight back as they will have no choice but to fight back—and people will pull back when they see no alternative but to retreat. Will we make good sense of why we must fight? Will the fight be the isolating call of, “Save My Job!” and lose, or will it be, “When They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back!” and win?

Resistance is rising as the recent battles in California universities show. However, it remains that retreat is workers’ main move now–as the debacle of the Detroit Federation of Teacher contract ($500 per month pay cut, massive health care cuts, merit pay, teachers disciplining teachers–all as the DFT leadership hugged the employer; teachers ratified at 60% as they were isolated from one another, saw no option).

Justice demands organization. If we are to overcome what can now be reasonably described as the emergence of fascism as a mass, popular, world-wide movement, the Rouge Forum needs to grow. We need your ideas, suggestions, comments, and criticism. You can post here at the blog or write any member of the Rouge Forum Steering Committee.

We hope you will spread the word, urge others to join our community, so the next decade will not end with the darkness this one has.

Good luck to us,
every one.

R

Rouge Forum News #15

2009-12-15T20:19:00.002-05:00

The latest issue of the Rouge Forum News is available here as a pdf.

Thanks to Adam Renner, the editor of the Rouge Forum News, and all the contributors for making RFN #15 the best issue yet!

A Winter Reflection

2009-12-13T11:18:00.001-05:00

In its more than decade of existence, the Rouge Forum has attempted to contribute to the conversation on social justice within national organizations, in union halls, in K-12 schools, in colleges/universities, at work places, and in community organizations. It has attempted to bring a reasoned analysis to contemporary issues using an historical lens, a sense of the total, and, often, pedagogical strategies. It has produced an appreciable amount of scholarship among its members—sometimes award winning scholarship—and has among its membership winners of academic freedom awards.

Undoubtedly, the Rouge Forum has become a relevant voice for social justice, particularly related to education. We hope to amplify that voice and continue to develop its relevance in the days to come. Recent events, tethered to their historical predecessors, indicate there is little time to dither.

One of the best things about the Rouge Forum, particularly those who have been able to take part in conferences and joint actions, is the sense of community. My partner and I remarked a few years ago at the conference in Detroit that we felt like we were home. We were among comrades who, while we didn’t agree on everything, seemed to have a congruent idea that things need to change and a relatively common idea of what that might look like. We could at least outline the picture.

Times together, such as these, assure us we are not crazy—that another world is not only necessary, but possible. Our work is continuing to figure out how we support one another, how we can have a voice in our particular locations, and how we craft and apply a vision of what is more just, more human, and right. Community. Voice. Vision. Connect reason to power, as Rich would say. Go.

And in that go-ing, we need sustenance for the journey—sustenance in the form of community and consciousness (ever-deepening, ever-evolving), but also hope. The hope I/we suggest is not naïve hope. It is hope grounded in struggle, connected to others. It is hope that is participatory. It becomes the essence of who we are. It is a politics of prefiguration that suggests if we want democracy and we want justice, then our actions, to the extent possible, will need to bear these out. It is to understand the journey/struggle not as precise, but as punctuations of imperfections, of hypocrisies that bring us back to the start, such that we can begin again.

This idea of the politics of prefiguration is espoused by a thoughtful theorist on hope: Rebecca Solnit. Her text, Hope in the Dark, pushed me to find hope in the struggle—in fact, catapulting me into that struggle. Solnit has enlivened that sense again in her recent essay in TomDispatch: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175168/tomgram:__rebecca_solnit,_writing_history_in_the_streets/, entitled Learning how to Count to 350. Re-citing a history of action in the streets and reasons to hope (in the face of all the reasons to despair), Solnit suggests, "To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty." Considering the dismal performance of communism in the 20th century (often more totalitarian and capitalist than liberatory) and the fact that global capitalism was brought to its knees last year, she suggests we've got work to do to (re)imagine the world.

And, we—that is, people of conscience—must occupy that void. Else, something else will. The steel-toed rhythm can be heard goose-stepping just inside the ear's horizon. I submit we'll need to step into that space sooner than later.

I'll see you at the barricades.

We'll have to resist what is more than likely coming next—find a voice, speak truth to power, take to the streets, take over a building. Escalate. Extending Rich’s metaphor from earlier work, we lambs look good to the wolves who regroup in the penthouses of their nearby woods (whose fuel is nearly spent) and in the corporate board rooms overlooking ever-drying creeks (more parts pollution than potable). They're finished buying what we have, as how much more cheaply can our labor power be had? Now, they plan to just take it (see: http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html).

And, they will use a god to convince you they are right. They will call on him, attempting to scheme us into doing the same (a little deposit of flesh now, and your children's flesh, for an eternity of made-up bed time stories, "Now I Iay me down to sleep....").

I'll keep my soul, whatever is left of it, thank you very much.

I'm looking, instead, for what Solnit calls a moment of creation—moments for which democracy, social justice, creativity, freedom, take one step forward.

Solnit is good at flipping the script, looking at the underside of the paper and seeing the scribbling of possibility. What she submits is an alternative read to the corporate media prophets (or is that profits?). We would do well to listen. Hers is not a naïve re-rendering or postmodern apologetics. My take is that Solnit’s proposition is grounded in the real. The alteration takes into account the work that is being done, often diminished by our popular discourse and corporate media. This alternative understanding helps us realize that others are struggling, voices are shouting, a history of resistance leads us to this moment of possibility.

Revolutionary praxis remains our guide: the simultaneity and dialectic of self change and the changing of society.

We should understand what it's going to take for that moment of creation. Those moments: when we realize the politics of divide and conquer have gotten the best of us (color/class/gender/sexuality-coded inequalities); when we realize that we that we are killing others (bought and paid for bombs with our signature on them), killing babies, mothers, difference with our own babies barely able to know differently in capital's schools (the militarization of schools); when we realize that our knowledge has been regulated by corporate interests to keep us docile and ignorant (high-stakes testing) in order to prepare us for jobs we will more than likely hate (alienation) so we will seek pleasure in (fetishize) commodities, that is, things, and our social relations will be mediated by reality TV and video games.

Try Wendell Berry’s recent poem on for size at your upcoming holiday celebration to bring the above into sharp relief: http://everydayliturgy.com/blogs/thomas/questionnaire-by-wendell-berry. You may not be invited back (which may or may not be a bad thing…)

When we recognize these issues as material reality, a moment will emerge. A moment (consciousness grounded in the real) that must lead to another moment (courage to change) in which we will need to figure out how to live differently (protest, resistance, occupation, freedom schools, sustainable living, new solidarities). Moments in which we own our labor power: the free development of each creates the conditions for the free development of all, since we will all recognize our interdependence and the strength of our difference.

More than likely, these moments will blur--because the barricades will not only be in the streets, but they will be in our work places, in our schools, in our churches, in our homes, in our community centers. Consciousness will merge with courage will merge with consciousness will merge with a more materialist understanding of reality, which will lead to how we can re-imagine wealth, well-being and poverty in the coming era.

We must. The wolves are hungry.

But, the lambs are plentiful. And, we will realize that we far outnumber the wolves when conscious because we will see and do differently.

When we see differently, we won't be divided so easily. When we see differently, we won't abide by mystical explanations of injustice; we will see it for what it is. When we see differently, we’ll stop looking at the deadness of the center and instead explore the possibility at the periphery. When we see differently we won't believe the mythology of national holidays intended to white-wash history and to, more importantly, mark the beginning of a new holiday season of debt and guilt built by the capitalists. Just look on the rez. How did Thanksgiving work out for those who welcomed the newcomers? Can we call it what it is, please: a celebration of genocide. And, we are still killing them (see the December, 2009, Harper’s Magazine article about life on the modern reservation). Christmas could use an RF News issue all its own…

When we see differently, we will note the possibility of solidarity born in moments of creation where we understand richness as fullness (of life and community), in the bread broken amidst laughter AND tears, in the totality discovered, in one more sunrise.

The Rouge Forum seeks this fullness.

Struggle. We must. Eyes open. Spirit fully engaged. Hands ready for the work.

See you at the barricades…

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-12-07T09:34:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,

www.richgibson.com/blog

Check the link above but note that Detroit may be the next centerpiece for education struggles soon. The Detroit Federation of Teachers bosses signed a tentative agreement (TA) with the Broad Foundation’s Detroit Financial Manager, Bob Bobb who now runs the system, that offers DPS $500 a month from each teacher’s check, or $10,000 a year, to be paid back as a no-interest loan when the teacher quits the system. With about 7000 school workers in DPS (not all classroom teachers), paying the dun for 2 1/2 years of the 3 year contract, that’s a $105 million no-interest loan to a school system that claimed it needed about $40 million in concessions from the school workers. More, DPS claims its on the brink of bankruptcy, which would likely dissolve the debt to educators.

The TA also includes huge give-backs in insurances (eliminating Blue Cross), merit pay, teachers evaluating teachers, and worse.

The contract language is murky on what looks like a union bracero program, selling the labor of members to DPS with a specious promise of repayment on the “loan,” (blackmail for a job).

The TA is here: http://mi.aft.org/dft231/ although in the past members have complained about not being told of the full measure of TA’s.In a meeting of about 2500 of the DFT members at Cobo Hall on Sunday, most rank and filers agreed that 90% plus rose to oppose the TA that was bargained behind their backs, involving the top national leadership of the AFT, like President Randi Weingarten.

No group of organized educators has been on strike in the last decade more than DFT rank and filers who led a huge wildcat strike, against their union, against the law, and against the employer–and they made gains.But today the DFT is relatively isolated. The union leadership stayed silent in the face of massive corruption and incompetence that infected nearly every aspect of Detroit school life. Citizens turned against the system as a whole.

When Broad’s Bobb arrived, citizens applauded as he rooted out the more obvious small time crooks in the system, but he left aside the contractors who looted the public by stealing millions in no-bid contract during the five year period of the Takeover Board, when the governor wiped out the elected board and replaced them with, mostly, suburban auto execs from the failing Big Three. The Takeover Board left DPS at least $40 million in debt.

Now, there are at least 10 newly built schools that sit empty and stripped of everything of value, schools that were built in the Takeover period–in a system that loses 12,000 students a year.

Bobb “won” a new $500 million bond issue to build more new schools by a 2/3 majority this fall, indicating his newly won clout, and his ability to syphon off more money from a system that claims it will build new schools, but demands blackmail payments from teachers. Bobb has already pulled out millions on no-bid offers to cronies in Broad related companies.

The DFT’s sellout Tentative Agreement will appear in urban bargaining tables everywhere next year, if DPS gets away with this. An injury to one really will go before an injury to all.Every expression of solidarity in opposition to this TA will matter. More, suburban MEA members need to unite with the DFT rank and file, join with parents and kids to create enough educational civil strife that drives the DFT bosses back to the bargaining table, forces them to report out a TA that makes gains, not concessions.

No union is ideologically or structurally prepared to take on the battles ahead–why we formed the Rouge Forum a decade ago.

When they say “Cutback,” We say “Fight Back!”

There is MUCH MORE on the blog linked above.

Good luck to us, every one.

r

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-11-30T17:25:00.001-05:00

The MORAL LAW causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger. Sun Tzu

Dear Friends,

There have been at least 16 occupations seeking to rescue education from the ruling classes in California this month, and more to come. UC Irvine next. Germany, Austria, and France also witnessed fight-backs coming from united students and workers.

To date, the only organized school voice in the US that recognizes the current crises as class war is the Rouge Forum–which may speak well for us, or not so well for others who, so far, hold onto wisps of unfounded hope made up of the shreds of democracy and citizenship in the USA.

The direct action occupations and the defenders outside the buildings up the ante for thought and action in schools and in the streets, demonstrating the violence behind capitalist democracy; overcoming the alienated notion that people other than us will save us.

On the Education Agenda is a Class War Agenda Front: Video: UC Berkeley Occupation and Cop Attack: “This university has no moral legitimacy at all…just violence.” And segment of comment from Susan Harman on the scene, “students we talked to who’d been inside said they broke hands and noses and clubbed people, and that they could hear the crackling of tasers.”
http://www.ktvu.com/news/21674608/detail.html

Every Movement Has its Scabs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHOnIJ2W1R4

UC Students Statement on the Necrophilia of University Life: “Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.”UC President Mark Yudof; “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.” Karl Marx http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/25/18630552.php

UC Santa Cruz Prof Robert Meister on the Use of Student Fees to Prop Up the Bond Income for the UC System (video and text): http://www.newspress.tv/main.jsp?category=News&id=585B

Peter Phillips of Project Censored: Higher Ed Cuts Serve the Rich: “The students who are protesting tuition increases know they are being ripped off. They know that we are bailing out the rich with hundreds of billions dollars for Wall Street and massive budget cuts for the rest of us. The corporate media doesn’t explain to over-taxed working families how they are paying more while the rich sock it away.”http://dailycensored.com/2009/11/22/the-higher-education-fiscal-crisis-protects-the-wealthy/

Ohanian on the Dem/Repub Alliance to Deny Education to the Public: “no group was a stronger supporter of NCLB than the Democratic Leadership Council. Take a look at this page. Click on a few of the articles–if you have the stomach for it.” http://susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=614

NYC + AFT To Use Student Test Scores for Teacher Tenure: “The city already uses test scores in evaluating the system: to determine teacher and principal bonus pay, to assign the A through F letter grades that schools receive, and to decide which schools are shut down for poor performance. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/education/26teachers.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Detroit’s DFT May Soon Report Out the Worst Big City School Worker Contract in History Including Massive Pay and Benefit Cuts, Layoffs, Merit Pay, and a “Covenant” With the Broad Foundation. Here is a short photo tour of some of the 69 closed and stripped Detroit Public Schools. http://richgibson.shutterfly.com/26

New Fairtest on the Race To the Top (RATT) and Merit Pay: http://www.fairtest.org/newsletter

AAUP Speak Out for Academic Freedom: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/protectvoice/overview.htm

The Falling Sky and Endless War Fronts: Yes, of Course the Sky is Falling: 15 Signs of American Ruin: “The economic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. public and society is unraveling at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the mainstream news media, but statistical societal indicators are reading red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 statistics that prove we are under attack.” http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144109V

Video Map of US Unemployment Growth Since Janurary 2007 (scary): http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

Every Hegemony Has its Holes: Reality Couple Meets Real Demagogue: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/us/politics/28crasher.html?hp

Demagogue To Send 34,000 More Troops to AFPAK: “Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy. Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/336/story/79380.html

Blair Warned Invasion Illegal: “Mr Blair refused to accept Lord Goldsmith’s advice and instead issued instructions for his long-term friend to be “gagged” and barred from cabinet meetings, the newspaper claimed. Lord Goldsmith apparently lost three stone, and complained he was “more or less pinned to the wall” in a No 10 showdown with two of Mr Blair’s most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan. Mr Blair also allegedly failed to inform the Cabinet of the warning, fearing an “anti-war revolt”. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iraq-the-uwaru-was-illegal-1830508.html

Bloomberg: Goldman (Gov’t) Sachs to Pay Just 1% Tax: “Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007. The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a6bQVsZS2_18

Safely Bailed Out AIG Forces Poor to Choose Between Water or Food:http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144203/bailed-out_aig_forcing_poor_to_choose_between_running_water_and_food

Who Manufactured the Auto Bailout? Obama Did: http://www.detnews.com/article/20091124/AUTO01/911240365/The-inside-story-of-the-GM–Chrysler-bailouts/?imw=Y

The Rouge Forum Steering Committee meets on December 15. Suggestions and ideas welcome. Criticism too!

Thanks to AG, Bob, Wayne, Adam and Gina, Bill B, Greg and Katie, Sandra, Shelly, Peter, David, Kev, Donna, Carol, Elvira, Tony, Arturo, Jesus, Marisol, Ann W, Candace, Abraham, MrZ and MrJ, Lloyd, Eric and Steve, Phillip, the Susans, Sherry, Marc and Bonnie, Victoria, Ileana, and Kerrie.

Good luck to us, every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-11-23T14:16:00.000-05:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/

>Workplace #16—Academic Knowledge, Labor, and Neoliberalism

2009-11-11T19:03:00.000-05:00

The Editors of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor are pleased to announce the release of Workplace #16—"Academic Knowledge, Labor, and Neoliberalism."

Check it out at: http://www.workplace-gsc.com

Table of Contents

Articles
Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic Labor
Bruno Gulli

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: Connecting Reason to Power and Power to Resistance
Rich Gibson, E. Wayne Ross

The Rise of Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education: The Eli and Edith Broad Foundation
Kenneth Saltman

Feature Articles
Theses on College and University Administration: A Critical Perspective
John F. Welsh

The Status Degradation Ceremony: The Phenomenology of Social Control in Higher Education
John F. Welsh

Book Reviews
Review of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
Desi Bradley

Authentic Bona fide Democrats Must Go Beyond Liberalism, Capitalism, and Imperialism: A Review of Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform
Richard A. Brosio

Review of Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools
Prentice Chandler

Review of Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism
Abraham P. Deleon

Review of Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession
Leah Schweitzer

Review of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy
Lisa Tremain

Read the Workplace Blog: http://blogs.ubc.ca/workplace/
Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24374363807&ref=ts

Call for papers: Neoliberalism and public education

2009-11-06T14:35:00.000-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Educational Studies Special Issue:
Neoliberalism and Public Education

Guest Editors: Richard D. Lakes & Patricia A. Carter
Social Foundations of Education
Georgia State University, Atlanta
Email: rlakes@gsu.edu

Increasingly neoliberal economic policies are transforming the delivery of
public education. In the current era of marketplace reforms the idea of
the public has been supplanted by a private ideology of risk management;
whereby, under individualization, students as consumers are taught
responsible choice strategies designed for competitive advantage in the
so-called new economy.

Under Keynesian economics, which held sway in the U.S., Britain, Canada,
and Australia from the 1930s to the Thatcher-Reagan era of the 1980s, the
public sought to ameliorate inequities stemming from race, class and
gender bias, but under neoliberalism the state has shifted to promoting a
meritocratic myth of governing the self. As old collectivities and their
support structures such as working-class labor and unions have begun to
disappear under advanced capitalism so too have their counterparts within
the school system.

In this special issue we seek manuscripts that explore the devolution of
public education under neoliberalism. We are interested in scholarly
papers that trouble the notion of risk in an educational environment of
competitive capitalism, the nature of specialized curriculums that are
devoted to social advantage, the ways in which schools have outsourced
services and privatized operations; and the assaults on teachers’ rights
through de-unionizing practices, the dismantling of seniority, and the
erosion of benefits. We are interested in case studies of neoliberal
designed school-based reforms as well as accounts of teaching about
neoliberalism in the social foundations classroom.

To submit manuscripts please use our online submission and review system
at Manuscript Central: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heds

Be sure to include a note that your submission is for the Special Issue on
Neoliberalism and Public Education.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: June 1, 2010.

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-11-02T09:24:00.001-05:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-10-26T10:37:00.001-04:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-10-19T11:52:00.000-04:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=26

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-10-16T09:10:00.002-04:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?m=200910

On the 8th Anniversary of the US Assault on Afghanistan--from Rich

2009-10-08T15:04:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

Today is the 8th Anniversary of the US assault on Afghanistan, a full invasion, war, in response to a crime.

In my section A section of the New York Times (CA) , there is no mention of that.

Since then, $12.9 trillion was given to the banks. The wars will cost around $3 trillion if they project into next year, as they will.

The government became a full blown corporate state, an executive committee and armed weapon of the rich. Schools merged with the effort, becoming full-blown missions for capitalism. Those educators who collaborated became, knowingly or not, its missionaries.

The American public, having agreed to shop during Bush's wars, can no longer shop. The US economy, 2/3 rooted in consumerism, cannot consume, nor produce, and the banks will not loan to the unemployed.
Spectacles continue, more and faster. Baseball! Football! Porn!!

The demagogue, Obama and his friend, Arne Duncan, now throw the Bush agenda for education into hyperspeed: Regimented curricula promoting witless nationalism, anti working class high stakes exams, militarization, layoffs and cutbacks, some privatization, and, with perfect logic, merit pay.

The union leadership of every major union cooperated at every turn, played a significant role in electing Obama, in harmony with their Quisling roles of the past. They are the nearest and most vulnerable of workers' enemies. Harsh measures for them.

Professional organizations accepted the division of academic labor they represent; remained largely impotent. Historians talked to historians, wrote a few petitions, rarely crossed the hall to deal with the sociologists. Some took up petitions, begging.

The rich grew much richer as barbarism rose. The poor became much poorer. Segmented by race, class, gender, split against each other by reactionary unions, now we see impoverished people battling for scraps.
http://www.detnews.com/article/20091007/METRO01/910070396/Chaos-at-Cobo--Detroiters-turn-out-for-federal-help

The education agenda is a war agenda. The core issue of our time is the reality of the promise of endless war and booming inequality met by the potential of mass, activist, class conscious resistance, connecting reason to real power.

http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/article/view/47

The youth at the occupation of UCSC point the way. Having a good school within this capitalist society is like having a reading room in a prison. Not acceptable.

The choice is clear enough. Community and resistance---or Imperial Barbarism.

Up the rebels!

Good luck to us, every one.

r

Rouge Forum Update--from Rich

2009-10-08T15:03:00.001-04:00

http://www.richgibson.com/blog/

Moot Points

2009-10-02T11:55:00.002-04:00

Any leftist can relate to the following type of conversation with "sensible" liberal types: you are asked about a topic, such as school choice, and when you respond with a pretty defined view (you know, what is called in some circles an "informed opinion"), then you are beset with a series of clarification questions. It's as if the question asker can't accept that you are not for school choice, so they try to negotiate you into postmodern confusion. They typically also have to insert that they like to remain 'open minded,' which is a not-so-subtle way of saying that you should do some rethinking because "there are good ideas in anything."

With school choice, I'm often asked if I would be for it if charter schools removed their admissions criteria to support open enrollment. I respond that it's a moot point- choice proponents will NEVER remove the ability to regulate who gets to go to their schools- that's the way they can exclude kids and raise test scores! If you made admissions 100% open AND, at the same time, provided reliable, federal funding to make these schools absolutely accessible, again, moot points. School choice would collapse. At that rate, you might as well fully fund and support public education- oh the horror!

Same for NCLB. People will ask me, "would you be for NCLB if there wasn't the standardized testing?" Are you kidding? Moot point! NCLB IS standardized testing- it's the center of the entire concept of the law! Get rid of the testing, and there is no NCLB. It has to be fully opposed and scrapped...unless you support testing. But the "sensible liberals" don't like having to clarify their views- instead, they want you to not be so "closed minded." They want to continue to hide behind their false neutrality and a leftist response doesn't allow them to do so for once. It is also a rare occurence so when they do encounter it, they often aren't sure how to proceed and then their whining can ensue: "How can they be so unreeeeeealistic?!!!" and so forth.

Take health care. Would I be for allowing the private sector to remain a "partner" in the scheme if they were regulated for the pre-existing condition thing and escalating costs? Moot point! Those are the two things that make private health care profitable! They will never get rid of those things.

After a while, these kinds of conversations hit rhetorical dead ends. I half expect to hear next:

"Slavery- would you be for it if it didn't involve the forced extortion of someone's labor?"

"Death penalty- would you reconsider it if it didn't involve the state-sponsored cessation of someone's life?"

Something needs to be done about this postmodernism run amok. Maybe if postmodernists would consider that there are some ideas that have to be opposed in order to preserve the notion of human rights. Oh wait. Moot point.

Letter of solidarity with the students at UC Santa Cruz

2009-09-28T13:16:00.003-04:00

To the UC Santa Cruz students:

We at the Rouge Forum applaud, admire, and support your efforts to help form a unified movement with the people of California.

The Rouge Forum is a group of 4500 educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice. (http://www.rougeforum.org/, http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum).

In the German Ideology, Marx submits, “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

The connection and simultaneous control of this material and mental production comes into ever-sharper relief anytime we are confronted by our corporate media. The level of discourse is less than satisfying. And, frankly, frightening. Pick the issue: health care, immigration, worker's rights, war, education. While all of the issues are truly critical, the last is particularly problematic since control of schools is a final domino to fall in the imperial quest to completely (re)fashion our reality. Remove critical thinking, make children compete against each other for perceived scarce resources (standardized tests), use the results to reify hierarchies based on social constructions like race and gender and class status, make teachers compete against one another for perceived scarce resources (merit pay), boil dissent down to participation in (mostly) corrupt unions, excuse and/or cover-up the school to military and prison pipelines, monitor and make impotent our schools of education through if-it-wasn't-so-sinister-it-would-be-comical accrediting bodies like NCATE, and regulate truth. This has been the agenda. And, it has already buried itself deep into our educational psyche.

Your willingness to continue to confront this reality beyond the one day UC walkout on September 24 is an illustration of both a more deepened consciousness and the work we will all have to do to protect public education toward the creation of a more whole and healthy society.

Rouge Forum Update--9-27--from Rich

2009-09-27T19:58:00.001-04:00

Why things are as they are: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=9

(Lots of great links here on the recent UC walkout. Feel free to share your stories here.)

No Sense of Irony...

2009-09-24T16:24:00.003-04:00

Okay, usually I am willing to go to the other side, as a way to get at the kind of thinking used on the right, but I've reached my limit. Granted, I understand that the whole "tea bagger" thing is an astro-turf project funded by the health care industrial complex, in particular Dick Armey, but the limits of logic have been so far exceeded that something has to be done. But where in the heck to start? We aren't dealing with rational thought, so hang on for the ride.
Case in point- this article: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/09/16/tea-party-protesters-protest-dc-metro-service/

Apparently republican Texas Rep. Kevin Brady is upset that the public transit system in D.C. wasn't ready for the influx (no, not one million but more like 70,000 if one doesn't count the faked Promise Keeper crowd photo from the 1990s) of protesters hitting the city to...protest government spending on public services. He went on to complain that seniors (who likely receive Medicare) attending the protest were forced to take cabs since there was no room for them on the trains. Now I'm confused. Isn't privatization and the "toll" system of paying for services the major policy dream of republicans and the Ayn Rand crowd? Why are they unhappy? This is their social vision come to pass. If I were a p.r. person for the libertarian party, I would whip up some t-shirts with the slogan "Walk Proudly- Renounce Socialism on Wheels."

Speaking of irony, a group of conservatives is concerned that only 25% of Oklahoma high schoolers correctly identified George Washington as the first U.S. president (http://www.news9.com/global/story.asp?s=11141949). I'm not a fan of these sudden polls that throw out rapid fire questions to then show dismal results as proof that schools are teaching frivolous things. It's so Reader's Digest. But here we have a situation where conservatives are concerned about ignorance, yet these are the same folks who think the earth is roughly 4,000-6,000 years old! I could also be jumping to conclusions. Maybe part of the 75% named Jesus as the first U.S. president (since he is top choice as favorite philosopher). Then the conservatives shouldn't worry so much.

What is next, a debate about whether the sun revolves around the earth and vice versa? One thing I have learned is to never, I repeat never, make a statement about how things are bad, but thank goodness no one has (fill in the blank) yet. Yes, there is an anti-Copernican website out there, so my worst fears have been realized: http://www.fixedearth.com/ It's just good to know that there are people on this planet taking Glenn Beck's advice and "question boldly" (except the official story of 9/11), since that is evidence of our "freedom." Of course Beck forgot the rest of Jefferson's quote, which is to question boldly the existence of God. But that's just being picky.

All I can say is that the postmodernists must be happy by now to see their vision, like the tea-baggers, come to pass.

Rouge Forum Update--9-20-09--from Rich

2009-09-21T09:52:00.001-04:00

See the RF Update here: http://www.richgibson.com/blog/?p=6

Letter of Solidarity with the UC Professors

2009-09-18T08:57:00.003-04:00

To the UC Faculty:

We at the Rouge Forum applaud, admire, and support your efforts to respond to tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes, which are indeed, complicit with the privatization of public education.

The Rouge Forum is a group of 4500 educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice. (http://www.rougeforum.org/, http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum).

In the German Ideology, Marx submits, “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

The connection and simultaneous control of this material and mental production comes into ever-sharper relief anytime we are confronted by our corporate media. The level of discourse is less than satisfying. And, frankly, frightening. Pick the issue: health care, immigration, worker's rights, war, education. While all of the issues are truly critical, the last is particularly problematic since control of schools is a final domino to fall in the imperial quest to completely (re)fashion our reality. Remove critical thinking, make children compete against each other for perceived scarce resources (standardized tests), use the results to reify hierarchies based on social constructions like race and gender and class status, make teachers compete against one another for perceived scarce resources (merit pay), boil dissent down to participation in (mostly) corrupt unions, excuse and/or cover-up the school to military and prison pipelines, monitor and make impotent our schools of education through if-it-wasn't-so-sinister-it-would-be-comical accrediting bodies like NCATE, and regulate truth. This has been the agenda. And, it has already buried itself deep into our educational psyche.

Your willingness to confront this reality on September 24 is an illustration of the work we will all have to do to protect public education toward the creation of a more whole and healthy society. Where Rouge Forum members are affiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to join you. Where Rouge Forum members are unaffiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to take part in campus wide discussions relative to the status of higher education, academic freedom, and the importance of public education.

We stand in solidarity with you and offer the graphic pasted above, created by Rouge Forum member, Bryan Reinholdt, an elementary performing arts teacher in Louisville, Ky.

Sincerely,

the Rouge Forum Steering Committee

They say cut back…we say fight back

2009-09-15T02:03:00.005-04:00

Rouge Forum poster for September 24 university/school walkout in solidarity with faculty at University of California

On the health care front: Doctors speak out for a single-payer system

2009-09-14T17:04:00.001-04:00

These doctors say we can handle the truth: http://www.madashelldoctors.com

Rouge Forum Update--9/13/09--from Rich

2009-09-14T15:20:00.000-04:00

http://richgibson.com/RFupdate091309.html

Call for manuscripts: Critical Education

2009-09-11T15:32:00.002-04:00

Critical Education is an international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

Critical Education is an open access journal, launching in early 2010. The journal home is criticaleducation.org

Critical Education is hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and edited by Sandra Mathison (UBC), E. Wayne Ross (UBC) and Adam Renner (Bellarmine University) along with collective of 30 scholars in education that includes:

Faith Ann Agostinone, Aurora University
Wayne Au, California State University, Fullerton
Marc Bousquet, Santa Clara University
Joe Cronin, Antioch University
Antonia Darder, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
George Dei, OISE/University of Toronto
Stephen C. Fleury, Le Moyne College
Kent den Heyer, University of Alberta
Nirmala Erevelles, University of Alabama
Michelle Fine, City University of New York
Gustavo Fischman, Arizona State University
Melissa Freeman, University of Georgia
David Gabbard, East Carolina University
Rich Gibson, San Diego State University
Dave Hill, University of Northampton
Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Purdue University
Saville Kushner, University of West England
Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Berkeley
Pauline Lipman, University of Illinois, Chicago
Lisa Loutzenheiser, University of British Columbia
Marvin Lynn, University of Illinois, Chicago
Sheila Macrine, Montclair State University
Perry M. Marker, Sonoma State University
Rebecca Martusewicz, Eastern Michigan University
Peter McLaren, University of California, Los Angeles
Stephen Petrina, University of British Columbia
Stuart R. Poyntz, Simon Fraser University
Patrick Shannon, Penn State University
Kevin D. Vinson, University of the West Indies
John F. Welsh, Louisville, KY

Online submission and author guidelines can be found here.

Rouge Forum Update--Labor Day, 2009--from Rich

2009-09-09T16:22:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

This week's update got a little long but there are bullet headlinesand notes on current job actions (Oakland U strike, UC strike, etc) early in this link, followed by a continuation of the discussion ofEducation vs Capital, why that is and what to do.Our friend Susan H got arrested in Seattle (not guilty as charged) for protesting the Torture Memos that came out of John Yoo and theBush administration, the ones that Obama would like to sweep away.

So, You Go Susan!

Steering committee members will be contacted this week.

Here is a link (http://richgibson.com/RFupdate090709.html) and good luck to us, every one.

r

Rouge Forum Broadside: Yes, We Told Them So: War, School, and The Demagogue

2009-09-01T10:51:00.005-04:00

The following is an RF Broadside, created by Rich Gibson. I have inserted a few [bracketed] additions to extend an already-compelling analysis. We encourage your feedback and additions.

It is probably not all that helpful to announce that we told you so, but....Yes, we told many people so.

The core issue of our time is the rapid rise of color-coded inequality and the emergence of world war met by the potential of a mass, class-conscious resistance.

These are not "public" schools we see. They are capitalist schools in a society where capitalism trumped whatever vestiges of democracy existed a decade ago. They are segregated schools [as the last domino was felled by the Supreme Court in July, 2007]. That's not merely the result of bad people doing bad things, exploiting others (though they surely are bad people) but also the consequence of a social system dependant on exploitation---meaning inequality.

The education agenda is a war agenda. It is a capitalism in crisis agenda, a Regimented National Curriculum agenda, mostly to promote nationalism.

Such a curriculum necessarily sets up anti-working class and racist high-stakes tests. Both teacher unions, the NEA and AFT, helped design both the national curriculum and the high-stakes exams. They are in no position to stop the next step. The professional organization, from NCTE to AHA to NCSS and all in between, proved more than impotent; they too collaborated. Those tests necessarily and logically lead to merit pay which already exists in the deep divide in, say, Detroit and suburb pay and benefits.

Militarization of schooling is part of the war agenda. National service=war agenda.

To some degree, privatization and charters are part of the war agenda. Privatization serves some sectors of elites, and others not. Why fully abandon a huge, tax supported, funnel for war, ignorance, and inequality; missions for capitalism and their unwitting, ever so nice, missionaries?
Restoring hope is part of the agenda, but it is false hope. The future is war, inequality, unemployment, horrible options for youth and it will not change without a mass social movement for equality. War means work; why many people enlist and proof that our choice is community or barbarism.

All of these interconnected attacks on life and reason have already happened, all over the western world.

Merely opposing any one of these factors, like merit pay, but not the rest just reinforces the entire project. As we see, NEA now dishonestly speaks out about merit pay, but NEA backed the regimented curricula and high stakes exams, sharply attacked people like Susan Ohanian who spoke against them, and dumped the students who suffered most from them.

Too late for NEA which is merely trying to keep the rubes sending dues money, but there is now nothing much NEA can do. Only direct action strikes, boycotts, etc., can halt the drive to the factors described above.

NEA has done nothing at all to prepare for that, and is not likely to do so. The union leaders are completely corrupt and their structures don't unite people. They divide people: city from suburb, students from teachers, teachers from other public workers and private employees---as easily seen in the California Teachers Association's effort to pass off a tax on poor and working people just months ago, a project that cost dues-payers millions of dollars and failed miserably, convincing the public, again, that educators want to pick their pockets.

What would be helpful is to wonder about the analytical and critical mistake that led to all that support for Obama, a demagogue.

Several things led to the hysteria around Obama.
1. A misunderstanding of capitalist democracy which is now sheer capitalism and little democracy. There was no significant difference between the Bush/Obama/McCain or even Clinton policies. Obama has betrayed, if we take his consistency as a betrayal, his liberal supporters who, for what have to be psychological reasons, still support his personification of the reign of capital which has, among other things, failed in every important arena of human life.
2. A misunderstanding of the gravity of the current situation vis-a-vis the war of empires. The US is in rapid decline in relationship to Russia, China and even Europe and Japan---economically and militarily-- and the US has lost any ability to promote itself as a moral nation, internally and externally. This puts extraordinary pressure on elites who need soldiers, Boeing workers, prison guards, and teachers too.
3. A misreading of the real internal crisis inside the US; the rapid rise of segregation and inequality--which has not, yet, led to civil rebellions. But everything is in place to lay the ground for those uprisings, except a left which can make sense of why things are as they are, and what to do. Lost wars. Collapsed economies. Immoral leaders caught with dozens of hands in a thousand cookie jars, war without reason pulling 1.5 million people into direct action---and the wreckage of their lives. All that, and more, should mean massive resistance. But that has not happened? Why not? No draft. No left. Spectacles. Divide and Rule. Carrot and stick. The education system. The same ways tyrants always ruled.
4. The continuing appeal of racism and nationalism. [One need only look at the continuation of residential segregation in most of America’s major cities; the segregation of children of color, generally, into lower-tracked curricula; the percentage of Black and Brown men in prison, the Black unemployment rate vis-à-vis their fellow white workers; and the assault on immigrants from the Global South]
5. Acceptance of the division of labor inside academia which means, for example, historians talk to historians and write books while literacy people talk to literacy people and write books, and few academics seriously organize anything at all, as the state of the campuses illustrate now. (And, there is an open willingness of the overwhelming majority of faculty to abandon their academic freedom in favor of standards). [As well, the university commons continue to be sold off to corporate interests, students become customers, and faculty become tradable entities focused more on chasing after grants than focusing on their craft.] This means historians, as in AHA, don't pay much attention to teaching while too many education personnel don't know much history.
6. A general public so mindless about history and social processes (class war) that it can rightly be called hysterical, potentially dangerous. Steeped in spectacles and consumerism for more than a decade, so vacant about their location in the world that Chalmers Johnson says they cannot connect cause and effect (as with the endless wars, but in regard to NCLB’s schooling as well). Fickle to the core, they howled for Bush, abandoned him when things went wrong, then another bunch howled for Obama, and now we see a new crowd howling about health care--all leaping for thousands of forms of selfishness that keeps the war of all on all that is the system of capital alive and well.

Not recognizing the historical moment, rejecting the real whole of the situation, capitalism in decay everywhere, shatters analytical and strategic capability, meaning many people cannot tell left from right, muddle along looking for someone else to save us when no one but the collective Us is going to save us.

Those who are not angry and seething a bit these days may not be witnessing the ravages of war, hunger, unemployment, and unreason itself. The education agenda is a war agenda. The war agenda requires an education agenda: 49 million kids in school; many draft eligible.

Yup. We told them so. Big deal. Those who have not made a big mistake in life can be absolved. We are all lambs among wolves. But we do not have to be lambs among wolves if we recognize, and act on, the role of class consciousness.

Good luck to us, every one. Join Us!

Rouge Forum Update--8-28--from Rich

2009-08-28T10:57:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

This will be the last update until after Labor Day. This one should hold up for readers until then.

Action Oriented Links:

Please note and try to attend the Freedom in Education Meeting in Fresno this weekend: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_nclb_stories.html?id=399

Call for Papers, the Rouge Forum News Number 15: http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/

The Rouge Forum Immortalized at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum

Deadline For Nominations to the Rouge Forum Steering Committee is September 1.

We recognize with sadness: the doors at Room 101, an incisive radio program on KZUM hosted by Michael Baker, are closed. Mr Baker's long run on the radio included interviews with key radical and progressive voices in education from Noam Chomsky to Wayne Ross and liberals as well. Congratulations to Michael Baker on a great run. Two, three, many Room 101s!

There are, at the beginning of the school year, 4,516 on our email list. Wish it was more? Send it along. Invite a friend.

Endless War:

Obamagogue Spins War News With the Best of Them: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=64348

Holy Cow! The Afghans are Not Helping: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/world/asia/23marines.html?_r=1&hp

Double Holy Cow! The CIA Threatens and Beats People! http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25detain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

"General Pickett, send more men." "But, General Lee, I have no more men." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/world/asia/24military.html?hp

Warlord Dostum Joins Karzai: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/73809.html?storylink=omni_popular

Council on Foreign Relations: Afghanistan is NOT a War of Necessity: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/opinion/21haass.html?_r=1

and Oh Yes it Is, It's The Pipelines, Stupid: http://prorev.com/2009/08/why-is-afghanistan-so-important.html

William Calley: Sorry About That: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/08/21/us/AP-US-My-Lai-Massacre.html?scp=1&sq=calley&st=cse

Mercs Outnumber US Troops in Afghanistan: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/22-0

Aghanistan's Rigged Election: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE57E0D620090823

Brother Can You Spare A Dime?

Unemployment Uber Alles: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/newspid=20601087&sid=aNaqecavD9ekhtml?_r=1&hp

California Unemployment Hits Post WW2 High: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-caljobs22-2009aug22,0,6343107.story

Detroit Unemployment at 28.9% http://www.freep.com/article/20090827/NEWS01/90827037/1320/Detroit-jobless-rate-a-record-28.9

Nope, But if You Are A Banker, Here is $12.9 Trillion, No Strings, No Kidding. It is Yours. Woo hoo.

Video--Where is that Tarp? What Tarp? What Me Worry? "I have to tell you honestly, I am shocked to find out that nobody at the Federal Reserve, including the Inspector General, is keeping track of [the unaccounted for trillions]." http://www.examiner.com/x-6495-US-Intelligence-Examiner~y2009m5d22-Federal-Reserve-Inspector-General-hedges-on-trillions-missing-in-Congressional-hearing

The Stim is Definitely Working? Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/25/christina-romer-stimulus-consumption-peter-rupert-opinions-columnists-thomas-f-cooley.html?feed=rss_opinions

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda:

Ohanian on Duncan's Merit Pay Schemes: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obamas-awful-education-pl_b_266412.html

The Education Stimulus is a Merity Pay Stimulus: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/education/17educ.

Ravitch on Obama's Awful Education Plan: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/obamas-awful-education-pl_b_266412.html

The State As an Executive Committee and Armed Weapon of the (Corrupt) Rich:

Holy Double Dog Cow: Hillbillary's and Obamagogues Pals are Crooks: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/nyregion/26fraud.html?hp

Notorious Friends of Hillbillary: http://prorev.com/hillaryfriends.htm

John Pilger on Brand Obama: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=56998&s2=16

Yes, We Told Them So: The Demoagogue
It is probably not all that helpful to announce that we told you so, but....Yup, we told many people so.

The core issue of our time is the rapid rise of color-coded inequality and the emergence of world war met by the potential of a mass, class-conscious resistance. These are not "public" schools we see. They are capitalist schools in a society where capitalism trumped whatever vestiges of democracy existed a decade ago. They are segregated schools. That's not merely the result of bad people doing bad things, exploiting others (though they surely are bad people) but also the consequence of a social system dependant on exploitation---meaning inequality.

The education agenda is a war agenda. It is a capitalism in crisis agenda, a Regimented National Curriculum agenda, mostly to promote nationalism.

Such a curriculum necessarily sets up anti-working class and racist high-stakes tests. Both teacher unions, the NEA and AFT, helped design both the national curriculum and the high-takes exams. They are in no position to stop the next step. The professional organization, from NCTE to AHA to NCSS and all in between, proved more than impotent, they too collaborated.
Those tests necessarily and logically lead to merit pay which already exists in the deep divide in, say, Detroit and suburb pay and benefits.

Militarization of schooling is part of the war agenda.

To some degree, privatization and charters are part of the war agenda. Privatization serves some sectors of elites, and others not. Why fully abandon a huge, tax supported, funnel for war, ignorance, and inequality; missions for capitalism and their unwitting, ever so nice, missionaries.

Restoring hope is part of the agenda, but it is false hope. The future is war, inequality, unemployment, horrible options for youth and it will not change without a mass social movement for equality.

All of these interconnected attacks on life and reason have already happened, all over the western world.

Merely opposing any one of these factors, like merit pay, but not the rest just reinforces the entire project. As we see, NEA now dishonestly speaks out about merit pay, but NEA backed the regimented curricula and high stakes exams, sharply attacked people like Susan Ohanian who spoke against them, and dumped the students who suffered most from them.

Too late for NEA which is merely trying to keep the rubes sending dues money, but there is now nothing much NEA can do. Only direct action strikes, boycotts, etc., can halt the drive to the factors described above.

NEA has done nothing at all to prepare for that, and is not likely to do so. The union leaders are completely corrupt and their structures don't unite people. They divide people: city from suburb, students from teachers, teachers from other public workers and private employees---as easily seen in the California Teachers Association's effort to pass off a tax on poor and working people just months ago, a project that cost dues-payers millions of dollars and failed miserably, convincing the public, again, that educators want to pick their pockets.

What would be helpful is to wonder about the analytical and critical mistake that led to all that support for Obama, a demagogue.Several things led to that.

1. A misunderstanding of capitalist democracy which is now sheer capitalism and little democracy. There was no significant difference between the Bush/Obama/McCain or even Clinton policies. Obama has betrayed, if we take his consistency as a betrayal, nearly all of his liberal supporters who, for what have to be psychological reasons, still support his personification of the reign of capital which has, among other things, failed in every important arena of human life.

2. A misunderstanding of the gravity of the current situation vis a vis the war of empires. The US is in rapid decline in relationship to Russia China and even Europe and Japan---economically and militarily, and the US has lost any ability to promote itself as a moral nation, internally and externally. This puts extraordinary pressure on elites who need soldiers, Boeing workers, prison guards, and teachers too.

3. A misreading of the real internal crisis inside the US; the rapid rise of segregation and inequality--which has not, yet, led to civil rebellions. But everything is in place to lay the ground for those uprisings, except a left which can make sense of why things are as they are, and what to do. Lost wars. Collapsed economies. Immoral leaders caught with dozens of hands in a thousand cookie jars, war without reason pulling 1.5 million people into direct action---and the wreckage of their lives. All that should, and more, should mean massive resistance. But that has not happened? Why not? No draft. No left. Spectacles. Divide and Rule. Carrot and stick. The education system. The same ways tyrants always ruled.

4. The continuing appeal of racism and nationalism.

5. Acceptance of the division of labor inside academia which means, for example, historians talk to historians and write books while literacy people talk to literacy people and write books, and few academics seriously organize anything at all, as the state of the campuses (and open willingness of the overwhelming majority of faculty to abandon their academic freedom in favor of standards) now. This also means historians, as in AHA, don't pay much attention to teaching while too many education personnel don't know much history.

6. A general public so mindless about history and social processes that it can rightly be called hysterical, potentially dangerous. Steeped in spectacles and consumerism for more than a decade, so vacant about their location in the world that Chalmers Johnson says they cannot connect cause and effect (as with the endless wars, but in regard to schooling as well). Fickle to the core, they howled for Bush, abandoned him when things went wrong, then another bunch howled for Obama, and now we see a new crowd howling about health care--all leaping for thousands of forms of selfishness that keeps the the war of all on all that is the system of capital alive and well.

Not recognizing the historical moment, rejecting the real whole of the situation, capitalism in decay everywhere, shatters analytical and strategic capability, meaning many people cannot tell left from right, muddle along looking for someone else to save us when no one but the collective Us is going to save us.

This, written months before the election and originally published in Workplace, online, is now floating around the net. http://la.indymedia.org/news/2009/08/229885.php Those who are not angry and screeding a bit these days may not be witnessing the ravages of war, hunger, unemployment, and unreason itself.

Yup. We told them so. Big deal. Those who have not made a big mistake in life can be absolved. We are all lambs among wolves. But we do not have to be lambs among wolves if we recognize, and act on, the role of class consciousness.good luck to us, every one. Congratulations to Sharon, Amber and the gang at a wonderful new school.

Thanks to Adam, Wayne, Gina, (Good health to Bob), Donna, Erin, Taylor, Jody, That Great Family, Irene and Tom, Della, Emily W, Sherry, Marc, Mary and Paul, Joe L, The Susans (always), Lucita, Marisol, Vincente, Arturo, Allen, Greg, Carrie, Harv, Norm, Frank, Teeyah, Glenn R, Dave (happy wedding), and Candace.

r

Rouge Forum Wikipedia site

2009-08-28T10:54:00.001-04:00

The Rouge Forum is on Wikipedia. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum.

Rouge Forum News CALL FOR PAPERS, Issue 15

2009-08-21T09:04:00.001-04:00

Rouge Forum News, Issue 15:
Call for papers

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 15 will be dedicated to our persistence in providing links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the general breakdown of community, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

We are interested in work from academics, other professionals who work in social service/change sectors, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

We NEED Art! Songs! Poems! Editorial cartoons! Links to online videos or other material!
We are looking for narratives, as well as research, and the interplay between research and practice which focuses on the economy, curriculum, unions, etc. If you have a story to tell, some research to share, a book to review, we'd love to see it. We would especially be interested in curriculum that you are developing and/or using in your classrooms which uses a class analysis as its primary focus.

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools/society --- writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry.

You can submit material for the RF News via email to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu.

PLEASE SUBMIT BY September 15, 2009.

See Issue 13 of the RF News here: http://richgibson.com/rouge_forum/newspaper/spring2009/index.html

See Issue 14 of the RF News, including the keynote speeches from Staughton Lynd and Greg Queen from our 2009 conference, here: http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/2009/08/rouge-forum-news-issue-14-just-released.html

And, see all past issues at http://www.rougeforum.org/.

Rouge Forum Update--August 16--from Rich

2009-08-20T14:16:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

Remember the closing date for nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee is September 1. Email nominations to RF Community Coordinator Adam Renner at: arenner@bellarmine.edu

Our No Blood For Oil, complete with those good-for-the-rest-of-your-life No Blood For Oil and Pyramid of the Capitalist System posters is updated at: www.rougeforum.org and the latest Rouge Forum News is now on our blog at http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/.

The core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded social and economic inequality challenged by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance.

On The Perpetual War Front:
*Afghan US Commander: The Taliban is Winning: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124986154654218153.html "Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come."

*McClatchey: More and More Mercs to Af-Pak: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/73407.html

*Dave Phillips Gazette on War Criminals Here and There: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqBZLTUPKcM http://www.gazette.com/articles/iframe-59065-eastridge-audio.html

*How do they get that way? "Kill the pig, Cut her throat, Spill her blood. ... " http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/08/1n8train002856-doomed-pigs-used-teach-first-aid/?northcounty&zIndex=146179

On The Social and Economic Collapse Front:
*Posner: It is a Depression and it is Not Over: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/08/its_not_a_reces.html

*In Michigan, Jail Means Jobs: http://www.freep.com/article/20090815/OPINION01/908150325/1320/Out-of-state-prisoners-mean-jobs

On The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and the Education Stim is a Merit Pay Stim Front:
*WSJ on the "Race to the Top, Who'll Blink First?" The Stimulus Package is a Merit Pay Package, and a War Package http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204886304574308442726348678.html

*Both the liberal NY Times and the slightly less liberal LA Times have editorialized repeatedly for merit pay. The demagoguge, Obama, who has betrayed every promise made to his sometimes hysterical believers, set up this equation: Education Stimulus=Merit Pay=More Reliance on Anti-working class high-stakes exams=deeper segregation=gutting educator pay=uneducated kids=war+bad jobs. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez9-2009aug09,0,6840948.column

*Stimulus Summary County By County: http://projects.propublica.org/tables/stimulus-spending-progress

*This is not a crisis, not a crisis, not a crisis: http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/09/us-us-afghanistan-080909/?politics&zIndex=146654

*McClatchey: Nobody Knows Where the Tarp Dough Goes: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/73212.html

*The Corporate State Behind Goldman Sachs: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141417/the_scandal_continues%3A_the_billions_in_govt._cash_behind_goldman%27s_%22profits%22?obref=obnetwork

On The Maybe Foucault Was on to Something After All Front (and don't forget Debord):
*Surveillance Files: TSA is Watching You: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090810/BIZ/908100303/Airlines--travelers-prepare-for-more-stringent-ID-rules

*This is fascism: a liberal analysis: http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/?page=entire

*Fascism and the Academy: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shame-of-Academe-and/47938/

*What is fascism? A radical analysis and another tied to schooling: http://www.richgibson.com/fascism.html; http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/workplace/article/view/47

*Town Hall Spectacles Everywhere on all Sides: http://www.baynews9.com/content/36/2009/8/6/505730.html

On the Coming Soon--the End of Detroit Front:
*Michigan's Democratic Governor appointed Bob Bobb a Broad Foundation employee active earlier in Oakland and D.C. to run the finances of the Detroit Public Schools, awash for decades in corruption and incompetence. Bobb interprets his mandate as, "everything." He's fighting with the inept but elected School Board over who holds power while the district collapses around all of them. Bobb is surrounded by small crooks at every level, true, but the bigger crook is Bobb, whose job is to restore some sense of order, get the books in line, and to fashion a black school system that will produce children fit and willing to fight in imperialist wars or accept bad jobs, no jobs, or jail. Still, Bobb has some ethical problems of his own. He awarded his former employer a near $1 million no-bid contract.More on Detroit's collapse soon. http://www.freep.com/article/20090811/NEWS01/90811035/Officials-knew-Bobb-would-hire-old-firm

On the Fight Don't Starve Resistance Front:
*Pasadena Kids, "We ain't got the do-re-mi" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEqir1Mh7Pk

*French Workers Actually Fight Layoffs: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-france-workers9-2009aug09,0,7784068.storyand resistance pays.

*Chino Goes Up: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/08/inmates-injured-in-chino-prison-riot.html

Please Note This Important Education Resistance Meeting:
*Resist Taking the California Star Test. Freedom in Education Meeting. Fresno State. 11 to 6 on August 29th. Lunch and Dinner Provided. Contact Joe Lucido: 559-225-1888. Join Us!

Thanks to Susan, Adam, Gina, Amber, George and Sharon, Tina, Bob A, Tommie, Donna, Linda, Candace, Della, Teeyah, Victoria, Bill B and G, Sandy and Van, MrJ, Wayne, Perry, Steve, Marc, Curry, Melinda, Sherry, Elvira, Patsy, Ricky, Chuck, Joey, Johnny B, Kim, Kelly, Marisol, Enrnesto, Keenan, Reggy B and Ina Y, Denny, Bruce, Debbie, Alan, Jim, Arelia, Jim O, and Dr. Divine.

Good luck to us,
every one.
r

Rouge Forum News (Issue 14) just released

2009-08-03T20:11:00.000-04:00

Issue 14 of the Rouge Forum News focuses on papers given at the the 2009 RF Conference: Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads: What do we need to know and how can we come to know it?, which was held in May at Eastern Michigan University.

This issue contains nine articles from conference presenters, including the keynote address of legendary activist, historian, lawyer Staughton Lynd and NCSS Defense of Academic Freedom Award recipient Gregg Queen. Other contributors include Cory Maley, Travis Barrett, Rich Gibson, Paul Ramsey, E. Wayne Ross, Carol Williams, and Adam Renner, plus poetry by Gina Stiens, Sonya Burton, and Billy X. Curmano.

Download Rouge Forum News Issue 14 (August 2009) [pdf]

Previous issues of Rouge Forum News can be found here.

Rouge Forum Update--July 28--from Rich

2009-07-28T17:16:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

Health and work delayed the update of the Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page at www.rougeforum.org. There you will find those good-for-the-rest-your-life nifty No Blood For Oil posters on sale and more. Plus, you will get a chance to see The Great Parade at the End of the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti this year: http://richgibson.com/rouge_forum/2009/Parade.mov

On the Education for Irrationalism Front: In a death by a thousand cuts, some one or some place may have to be first. It could be Detroit where between 1/3 and 1/4 of the teaching staff was notified that they had three days to find a new job in the school system as they were "reconstituted" by test scores. This announcement came from Bob Bobb, appointed Czar of the school system by the Democratic governor. What did the Detroit Federation of Teachers do? Less than nothing. They called a building rep meeting (not a mass meeting, too risky) for tomorrow, Tuesday, and then threatened a small group of teachers who tried to take up a petition opposing the firings, saying the petition had nothing to do with the DFT. This may be the end of what was once the finest school system in the western world. The end of the schools would mean, literally, the end of Detroit. DPS Vacates 2600 Jobs, Schools Reconstituted: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090722/SCHOOLS/907220369/DPS-vacates-2-600-jobs-at-41-schools

The Obamagogue's Stimulus Money for Schools is Merit Pay: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers24-2009jul24,0,6767455.story

How Will the UC Survive? http://laprensa-sandiego.org/editorial-and-commentary/how-will-the-university-of-california-survive/

California Faculty Association's Narrow Vote For Furlough/Concessions: http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/24/us-california-university-cuts-072409/?dsq=13291864#comment-13291864

The American Federation of Teachers Sees Charters as a Cash Cow; NEA Next?http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/education/27charter.html?hp

Calpers/Sters Lose $100 Billion: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-calpers22-2009jul22,0,5416427.story

On the War They Are Not Going to Win (Long supply lines, difficult communications, no moral standing, huge country to invade--can anyone remember the US Revo?) Front: Payoff For War Crimes:

New Gi Bill: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090721/SCHOOLS/907210345/1409/METRO/A-surge-from-bunker-to-dorm--New-GI-Bill-takes-battle-out-of-higher-ed

Hedges: We are Losing the AFPAK Wars: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090720_war_without_purpose/

On The Hoo-boy There Goes the Economy Again Front: Wall Street Jacks up Pay After Bailouts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/07/22/AR2009072203687.html

But US Manufacturing at 2/3 Capacity: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/72485.html

And, of course, people fight back, even if we have to look for them at a distance: In France: More Bossnappings: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009517317_apeufranceworkerunrest.html

In China, Steel Workers, Angered by Inequality and Layoffs, Demonstrate and Kill a Boss: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE56P09620090726

Remember, nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee close August 15.

We note with sadness the death of Ken Macrorie, an honorable man, a great teacher and writer: http://www.webfh.com/fh/obituaries/obituary.cfm?o_id=254464&fh_id=11112

Thanks to Susan H and O, Amber, Kelly, Sandra, Sally, Joan, Donna, Eric, Carol, Sherry, Peter M, Don A, Bill A, Terry Schaeffer, Ramona, Sharon, Ken, Echo, Beau, Daniella, Candace, Bob, and Della.

Good luck to us,
every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update--July 20--from Rich

2009-07-28T17:09:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is up and updated at www.rougeforum.org.

Remember, nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee can be made to Community Coordinator Adam Renner by August 15 (arenner@bellarmine.edu)

On the Capitalist Education for War and Inequality Front:Obama to Schools: Change Tenure Laws or Else: The Ed Stim is Merit Pay: http://gothamschools.org/2009/07/09/obama-official-to-new-york-change-your-tenure-law-or-else/comment-page-1/#comment-154665

UC System Demands 9% Tuition Hike and 8% Pay Cut While Class Size Boomshttp://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/jul/15/bn15uc-budget-cuts/?california

CSU Boss Wants 20% Tuition Hike: http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/story/2033136.html

Substance News carries the wrap up of the National Education Association Rep Assembly: www.substancenews.net

Linda Chavez, a top aide to the American Federation of Teachers' Albert Shanker, testifies against Sotomayor: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/07/16/AR2009071603124.html

On "The Depression can only be a passing fancy" Front: Paul Craig Roberts: "This should tell even the most dimwitted patriot who “their” government represents." http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07162009.html

Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs and the Great American Bubble Machine: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print

#Chart on the Waves of California Jobs Lost: http://www.sacbee.com/1232/rich_media/2022115.html

Reuters: Foreclosures Hit Record High: http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE56F0XK20090716

The International War of the Rich on the Poor Front: The Bushamagogue Assassination Schemes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/the-democrats-selective-a_b_233708.html

Michael Klare's Shocker: Iraq as the New Oil Pump http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175095

And the Resistance (bad example/good example) Front: So Long EFCA: Union Bosses Can Deliver---nothing: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/17union.html. UK Public Worker Strikes Rise http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/newspid=20601087&sid=aw6B8IQyUQME

The many crises grow around us apace. Unemployment and foreclosures mean an eradicated tax base, meaning more demands for cuts on education and services, increased taxation of those who have a little, more pr to crush hope in the sense that nothing can be done, more police activity to raise funds and tamp down resistance, and more spectacles. On the war front, more war---for oil, regional control, that is, profits, using the children of the poor to fight the children of the poor on behalf of the rich in their homelands. What stops the madness? Understanding that the core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded inequality to the potential of mass class-conscious resistance. That has been the project of the Rouge Forum, connection reason to power, for more than a decade.

Please join us and help lead the fight-backs that will come.

Thanks to Bob, Al, Sean, Amber, Tony, Kino, Marisol, the Dean, Candace, Sally, Sheri, Barb and Ken (yes, that is right), Donna, Brian, Adam and Gina, Koli, Jesus, Ashwana, Bill, Joe, Dariah, the Susans, and Ann.

Good luck to us,
every one.
r

Critical Education: New journal to officially launch in early 2010

2009-07-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

Critical Education is a new international peer-reviewed journal, which seeks manuscripts that critically examine contemporary education contexts and practices. Critical Education is interested in theoretical and empirical research as well as articles that advance educational practices that challenge the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education.

Critical Education is an open access journal and uses the Open Journal Systems management and publication platform, which was developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University to expand and improve access to research.

Critical Education is hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia and edited by Sandra Mathison, E. Wayne Ross and Adam Renner.

Mathison, Ross, and Renner have extensive experience as educators, researchers, and academic journal editors in the United States and Canada.

Mathison is currently Editor-in-Chief of New Directions in Evaluation. She is also editor and author of several books including Encyclopedia of Evaluation, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment, Battleground Schools and most recently Researching Children's Experiences.

Ross co-edits Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor and Cultural Logic and is former editor of Theory and Research in Social Education. His books include Neoliberalism and Education Reform (winner of the 2009 Critics' Choice Award from the the American Educational Studies Association), Education Under the Security State, The Social Studies Curriculum, and Image and Education, among others.

Renner is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. As well, he serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Core in the Bellarmine College of Arts and Sciences. Once a high school math teacher, Renner received his Ph.D from the University of Tennessee in Cultural Studies. He teaches courses on social difference, social justice, globalization, international service learning, and general pedagogy.

Renner's research interests are tightly connected to the courses he teaches. He has published in such venues as the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Educational Studies, the International Journal of Learning, and Intercultural Education, among others. He is the editor of The Rouge Forum News.

Additionally, among many invited lectures, he has delivered more than forty papers at professional conferences in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Jamaica. Since 1998, Adam has coordinated an international partnership which pairs students and faculty from the US with educational and health workers in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

In the coming weeks and months Critical Education will be announcing additional members of the Editorial Team as well as members of the Editorial Collective.

Our aim is to officially launch the journal in early 2010.

For more information visit the journal's website.

Rouge Forum Update: Call for Steering Committee

2009-07-14T10:43:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

Below is a call for nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee from Community Coordinator Adam Renner--and below that more resources on the system of capital vs education, including analyses of the National Education Association Representative Assembly.

The Rouge Forum a group of educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice.

Needless to say, work toward these goals in the spirit of justice, demands organization. The Rouge Forum is now more than 10 years old. Over the first decade of its existence, members have built an international network of around 4500 professors, teachers, students, artists, and other social service workers. We have engaged in actions, put on conferences, written papers, and built the capacity of our community. We have done these things with no attachment to any hierarchy or any official organizing strategies. Wanting to keep the horizontal nature of such a network while also desiring to better coordinate our actions, the RF is currently accepting nominations for the 09-10 Steering Committee.

Members of the Steering Committee will be expected to actively promote the 2010 conference and attend where possible, help develop and actively participate in Regional RF Chapters, attend the Fall Steering Committee retreat, promote the RF at other conferences, seek out like-minded people and organizations to link the RF with, provide essays for the Rouge Forum News where possible, and build the capacity of our community by support of its members.

In particular this steering committee will be crucial toward the formation of Regional Chapters, mentioned in the list above. We would like to see regular meetings of the regional chapters and work toward some type of coordinated action (e.g., a one day freedom school, a teach-in, a one-day retreat for teachers, an evening panel/speaker on a coordinated topic, a protest action, etc. as a lead up to the 2010 conference and as a preview of more focused, coordinated, and regular actions in the future). Perhaps in organizing more locally/regionally, we can spend more time face to face, as well as enacting nation/world - wide coordinated actions. Please send your nomination to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu by August 15, 2009.

"On the Education for Liberation Front: Two great, censored, photos of Arne Duncan, teaching: http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_cartoons.html?id=601

Detroit Schools May File Bankruptcy, Could Void Contracts--Using the GM Model: http://www.freep.com/article/20090709/NEWS01/90709050/Bankruptcy-considered-for-DPS

If a bankruptcy judge allows this unprecedented school bankruptcy, it could mean wages slashed in half, pensions and health benefits gutted. If it happens in Detroit, it sets the stage for many others. Substance News on the Wrap-up of the National Education Association Conference: http://www.substancenews.net/

Vote: Should 11,000 CSU Faculty (all of them signed a loyalty oath) take a 10% Pay Cut? The Union Bosses don't know. "NOTE: The CFA Board did not take a position on how members should vote." http://www.calfac.org/furloughvoteinfo.html

The State of US Unionism:Union Hacks Slug it Out--Solidarity Forever: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/business/09labor.html?em but nothing will stop them from uniting for a free lunch with The Obmagogue: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/union-leaders-to-meet-with-obama-next-week/?scp=1&sq=van%20roekel%20obama%20stern&st=cse

The International Scene:Mediations, a left journal from South Africa, with many fascinating critiqueshttp://www.mediationsjournal.org/

Parenti on Obama and the coup in Honduras which sparked a nation-wide school strike: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/08-3

Obamagogue (of the AIG, Madoff, Enron, Martha Stewart, etc, USA) lectures Africans on Corruption:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obama-africa12-2009jul12,0,7755225.story

Stiglitz on Auditing the $3 Trillion Wars: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/07/auditing_the_iraq_war_and_its.html

Thanks to Amber, Brian, George and Sharon, Susan O and H, Joe, Mark, Jesus, Donna, Candace, Lance, Sheri, Ken, Barb, Matthew, Bill, Jane W and friends, Mike L and A, Perry, Kathryn, TC, Tony H, Hilda, Marisol, Brit, Della, and Bill.

Good luck to us,
every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update -- 7-5-09 -- from Rich

2009-07-07T11:36:00.002-04:00

On the Madness and Boredom Front:
Substance News is carrying reports from the National Education Association's Representative Assembly, running through Monday, here:
http://www.substancenews.net/

On the Educational Miracles Front:
Substance has exposed the Chicago Miracle, the reason Arne Duncan holds his position as Ed Boss, for years. However, here is another expose, from an unexpected source:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/downloads/CPS.pdf

On the What Do You Mean We Had Something to Do With that Coup and What Do We Know About the School of the Americas Front:
http://www.soaw.org/

On the Everyone Can Make it in America Front, the Jobless Rate Hits a
26 Year High:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/02/us-unemployment-june-467000

On the Someone is Actually Doing Something About all of This Front:
The San Francisco Freedom School is open for summer:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/SFFS/2009program.html

Russian Students are Resisting:
http://www.rferl.org/content/Russias_New_Standardized_Exams_Fail_The_Public_Test/1761799.html

You can do something too. There is one organization in North America, rooted in education, that connects the wars, unemployment, de-industrialization, class struggle, and the crises in schools: The Rouge Forum. Next week we will circulate a call for nominees for this year's Rouge Forum Steering Committee. We urge you to join us. Please spread the word.

Thanks to all the courageous delegates at the NEA RA who spoke to me and gave me so much information. You'll see it in print in the coming days. If you are still at the RA and we have not met, please email me asap, or we can talk when you get home.

Thanks too to Amber, Wayne, Adam, Bob, Colleen, Tammy, Christina, Katie and Greg, Bill, Joe, Sally, Sue, Donna, Kathy Y and E, Gil, Tony, Jill, Eric, Marcie, Isabella, Victoria, Donnie, Tally, Shawndre, Teeyah, Pete, and Doug.

Good luck to us, every one.

r

Rouge Forum Steering Committee Meeting minutes from RF Conference, 2009

2009-06-14T13:09:00.004-04:00

The following is an excerpt of our steering committee meeting minutes:

Rouge Forum Steering Committee
May 2009, Conference
“Gettin’ ready to be ready”

Reflections on the conference
What went well?

Well-organized, ran smoothly, program was great
Coordinator was on top of every detail
Retained sense of collective within the group
Institutional support
More people took responsibility to add to this conference than ever before; leadership is spreading out
New people attended
High school students
Inclusion of art (a plus at every RF conference)
Meeting with others and exchanging ideas about what we can do in the classroom

What didn’t go so well?

would have liked to see more people here
evaluations should have been distributed at registration (necessary for CEU credits)
lack of attendance by college of ed faculty from universities at locations where conferences are held (historic problem)
not many dissenting opinions at conference (should we invite in future?)
media blackout
labor folks did not show up for Staughton Lynd despite invitations
need plenary sessions at end of each day

Recommendations:

scholarly debates (inviting more opposition)
continue to invite local educators
consider a webcast of the conference (live streaming)
consider one day conferences / evening events at the local level –perhaps coordinated across the country so that similar events are happening on the same day in multiple locations
consider conference within conference – attend other conferences and plug RF; ex. NCSS, we have had several sessions by RF members and have put together fliers highlighting the sessions at the conference by those RF folks. (note upcoming conferences in Pittsburgh—AESA, and Atlanta—NCSS)
offer one day freedom schools for high school students
daily plenary at the end of each day
attract more community college folks
create an art installation

Next year’s conference

Where? Seems like we have a good lead on Aurora University. More information to follow.

Steering Committee Retreat

Where? Seems like Antioch, Chicago, or San Diego are possibilities. More information to follow.

Down the road:

Create a 15th anniversary mega-conference in 2013 in Vancouver? AERA will be in Vancouver in 2011—one day preconference before AERA for a preview of our 2013 conference (topic: Academic Capitalism, The Corporate University, Academic Freedom...)
LA in 2012?
local or regional conferences as well

Other discussions:

Online programming
Teacher education
Conflict resolution

Where do we go from here?

Getting the word out
The RF News (next issue will feature keynote speeches and other papers from the conference; maybe turn it into an edited text?)
Suggestion for creating a scholarly journal for the purpose of publishing work of RF folks, etc.
The blog – more of a repository at this point, not much discussion at this point
Facebook
Textbook on curriculum
Coordinated talks across the country (regional meetings that we might have with similar topics – same topic held on same day. This means that we will have to formalize regional chapters that could coordinate this type of event.)
Stay tuned for updates on the 2009-2010 steering committee

Rouge Forum Update--5-20-09--from Rich

2009-05-20T10:57:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

We will circulate a full report from the Rouge Forum Conference at Eastern Michigan University over the weekend. This is a very brief preliminary report from the student newspaper: http://www.easternecho.com/content/rouge-forum-discusses-youth-education-emu-0

On the Education Front: http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/may/19/ca-special-election-051909/?california&zIndex=101745&dsq=9568515#comment-9568515

The California Teachers Association and NEA bosses wasted more than $12.2 million on their outrageous tax the poor scam that failed completely and, worse, managed to convince even more poor and working people that organized education workers are actually enemies. Nice work, CTA.

Meanwhile, UTLA managed to cower their way out of what was to be last Friday's mass walkout, fearful of a judge's order against it.

Everyone should be clear on this. The only illegal job action is one that fails. If thousand of teachers walked out, the judge would do nearly nothing, indeed nothing except try to fine CTA. So? CTA is not a bank and CTA members can picket judges' homes.

The Green Dot Takeover: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-greendot11-2009may11,0,3289443.story

Since UTLA and NEA have done so little to build a base among poor and working class parents and kids, and since AFT loves Green Dot, this plan to seize the school system is conceivable.

And it is another move from the LATimes to attack the rising militancy of the education workers who have a walkout scheduled this week.

There are thoughtful and active alternatives to all this..... http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

Obama placed Bob Bobb, paid jointly by the Broad Foundation and the Detroit Public Schools, in charge of DPS. Then The One declared Detroit "Ground Zero," in the education wars. Bobb announced a plan to federalize DPS. Would that be a first? http://www.susanohanian.org/show_nclb_outrages.html?id=3621

On the Perpetual War Front (the education agenda is a war agenda):

Obamagogue To Cover up Torture Photos:

On the Fake Radicals Front:

Once the Weathermen were liberals (and police agents) with bombs. Terrorists who opposed the hard work that it takes to build a mass class conscious movement to transcend the system of capital. Now, they are just liberals without bombs. But, unlike Billy Ayers and the rest of the Weathermen, at least Mark Rudd admits he and his ganglet destroyed the Students for a Democratic Society on the eve of the biggest outpouring of mass action from 1950 on. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/books/review/Barrett-t.html

On the Organized Decay is an Element of Fascism Front:

Detroit Photo Essay: Who is next? http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essay/detroit-troubled-city
Neighbors Prevent Firefighters from Saving Detroit Drug Den: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090518/METRO01/905180378/Neighbors-harass-Detroit-fire-crews-fighting-blaze-at-drug-house
Foreclosures hit high in April http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/may/13/us-foreclosure-rates-051309/?california&zIndex=98434
The troubling reality that fascism in the past has sometimes been a popular mass movement: The Third Reich at War http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/books/review/Reich-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books

On the "This is not, not, for sure, not a depression, it's ah, well, ahem," Front: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/books/review/Rauch-t.html?ref=books

Tickled by the NYTimes reassurance that this is not, surely not, absolutely not, could not be, a GREAT depression, it's just a depression. And good time are right around the corner. On the Unions Became What They Claimed to Set Out to Oppose Front: UAW Won't Strike Chrysler Until 2015: http://www.freep.com/article/20090513/BUSINESS01/90513086/UAW+won+t+strike+Chrysler+through+2015

You don't need to pay a union to surrender. You can throw up your hands and do that alone. Concessions do not save jobs. They just make bosses want more. The UAW is a prime example. When they say cut back, we should say, Fight Back!

The Torment and Demise of the United Auto Workers Union: http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

Unions are unfit to meet the crisis at hand. While it may be important to have one toe in a union in order to meet people and build a base for real change, it is equally important to have ten toes out of the union---in an organization that can connect reason, passion, and power. Like the Rouge Forum. Please spread the word. There is no single "Line" of the RF. We have many voices and many varying talents. Here are the last two stanzas to the great workers' song Solidarity Forever:

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learnThat the Union makes us strong. In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the oldFor the Union makes us strong.

Well, the union didn't make us strong, but the rest is on the mark and the struggle continues.

Thanks to Joe Bishop and the Eastern Michigan volunteers, Adam and Gina, WayneO, Nancye, Patricia, Faith and Craig, Greg (whose speech will be up by the weekend), Pat B, Bill-Scott--the youths-and Marty, Paul, Cory, Connie, Travis, Roger, Doug S and Doug Y, Gil G (that book is terrific) Billy X, Donna, Sherry, Zena, Em, Candace, Rebecca, Sonia, Maria, Chris (what a long drive), Susan O and H, O and Ido and the baby, Steve and Perry for getting things going and you too Kevin and Marc, Michael who is a smart guy and good friend, the heroic Sergei and the secretaries, Jeremiah, The Uprising and Tainted Machine, Staughton Lynd who is a beacon of good sense, Marty G who should have been there, Big M, Bob and Tommie, and all who made the conference a delight.

Good luck to us, every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update--5-9-09--from Rich

2009-05-13T14:58:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

Less than one week to the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan at Eastern Michigan University. Keynote speakers include Staughton Lynd, author, radical historian, civil rights leader; Greg Queen, winner of the National Council for the Social Studies "academic freedom award," and Rebecca Martusewicz, eco-justice educator and activist. http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

Education News Students at Los Angeles' Crenshaw High walked out of school last week in protest of budget cuts: http://www.wavenewspapers.com/news/local/west-edition/44620717.html

People are being positioned so that the fight-back is almost inevitable. The question is: Will it make any sense and win? http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers10-2009may10,0,1000273.story

Call it paranoid but it is not entirely coincidental that the LATimes is running a series of articles on "bad teachers" and UTLA (which may well be true) just days before the planned UTLA walkout on May 15. The walkout, unfortunately, is scheduled for that date in order to not disrupt district testing, but it is one of the first direct-action responses to come from any large NEA or AFT local. The walkout came to being after considerable rank and file struggle inside the union, demanding collective action.The LATimes does not have much to say about the reasons for rising inequality and the real promise of perpetual war, that is, capital's relentless quest for profits. Nor does it deal with the daily lives of children in Compton and when it does mention them, it does so in terms of being under privileged, not super-exploited. But, come to think of it, UTLA doesn't speak in those terms either. Its parent body, CTA, is working with the Gropenfuhrer to pass the anti-working class tax hikes, trying to panic voters into taxing themselves rather than the rich. A recent CTA news spends most of its glossy pages telling teachers how to adjust to the financial crises, rather than how to fight back, dealing with the consequences of the crises rather than to address the causes at the root. http://www.utla.net/

There are alternatives: http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

Here is the New Yorker's abstract of an article touting the partnership of the American Federation of Teachers and Steve Barr, of Green Dot charter fame: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_mcgray and a response from Susan Ohanian http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=545

But the fact is that the education agenda is a war agenda, and vice versa: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20965

Industry, Finance, War, and PedagogyChrysler Gets Judge to Allow The Bankrupt Company to Borrow $4.5 Billion from USA! Huh?http://www.freep.com/article/20090504/BUSINESS01/90504013/Judge+lets+Chrysler+borrow+$4.5+billion

Don't forget those Good For the Rest of Your Life Rouge Forum Posters: http://www.geocities.com/elethinker/posters.html

Chalmers Johnson on the Signs of Decay http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2CCs-x9q9UThe banks behind the Meltdown (Center For Public Integrity): http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/economic_meltdown/

One-half million people are now fleeing the Swat Valley. Whether the guerrillas will stand and fight or melt away is yet to be seen:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/half-a-million-flee-swat-valley-as-pakistan-faces-months-of-fighting-1681831.html

In April and May, 1975, US forces fled Vietnam, the world's most powerful empire forced out by peasant nationalists who fought imperialism for decades, making huge sacrifices. The US defeat was caused, mainly, by Vietnamese military and political operations, but also by the actions of soldiers in the US military and civilians in the anti-war movement. Here is a clip from the film, Sir No Sir, as a reminder that people can resist, under harsh conditions, and win http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDk6Qal2DCI

May 9 is Victory Day (May 8 in the US--Victory in Europe day) seemingly forgotten in America now. But the sacrifices of the people of the world in defeating fascism should be remembered: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/What_Is_Fascism_Gibson.html

Thanks to Joe B and the entire Ypsi gang for pulling together a great conference and to Adam Renner and Gina Stiens for taking the lead in developing the most recent edition of the Rouge Forum News: It is the only clear expression of education radicalism in the US. http://richgibson.com/rouge_forum/newspaper/spring2009/index.html

Thanks too to Susan H and O, Amber, Diego, Ernesto, Lucy W and S, Jesus, Joseph, Amilia, Candace, Bob and Tommie, Wayne and Perry, Steve, Big Al, Nancy, Lisa, Marisol, Ricio, Chantelle, The Wailers, Harv, Ned, Ray, Earl, Sandy and Van, Mickey, Jim, Phillip and his entire gang, Selene and Frank, Carolina, Maria, Bruno, Daniel, Natalia, Nereyda, Edgar, Edwardo, and Gil

All the best and good luck to us every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update--5-4-09--from Rich

2009-05-13T14:56:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

Less than two weeks until the Rouge Forum Conference ( www.rougeforum.org), May 15-17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Join us! Come meet others whose interest in education goes to society as well. The core issue of our time is rising color-coded inequality met by the possibility of mass, class-conscious, resistance. No education organization in North America has the limited good sense and courage to say that.

The National Education Association will meet in San Diego in July, making sure no NEA member grasps this is not a tea-party but class war. Here we see how NEA pours $2million more into a campaign for a regressive California tax: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/29/BAK317ATCO.DTL

United Teachers of LA plan a one day walkout on May 15, but they don't want to interrupt testing. Huh? Primer on Chrysler Bankruptcy: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/business/01primer.html?_r=1&hp

Well, at least this is 1/2 good news. "Union leaders said they chose May 15 "to have the least conflict with monthlong testing," including the state's STAR tests, which are the most prominent yardsticks for a school's academic standing. But there are Advanced Placement tests, which are important for college applicants, scheduled for that day. "In a week, Chrysler went under, the Sunnis rose again, the Taliban swept 60 miles from the capital--some week! The UAW's retiree VEBA benefits to disappear? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103703634&ft=1&f=1001

Who can argue that the government, the capitalist democracy in which the latter always loses, is anything more than executive committee and armed weapon of the rich? How the Banksters "own the place," in Congress: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009051801/banksters-win-one-lose-one-congress

We note with sadness the death of WIlliam Pomeroy whose writings on the Huks in the Philippines was terrific: http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/14337/ See his book, The Forrest, among others. Marx on School: "The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes to the self-valorization of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to belaboring 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. The concept of a productive worker therefore implies, not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of the work, but also a specific social relation of production, a relation with a means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." Marx 1977, Capital, Vol 1, translator, B. Fowkes, New York, Vintagep 644.

Thanks to Wayne, Joe B, Adam and Gina, Phillip, Tammy, Donna, Sue H, Sherry, Connie and Doug, Eric C and S, Ginger H, Don A, Virginia P, Carol, Susan and Susan, Paul and Mary, Sandy and Van.

Good luck to us, every one!
r

The Rouge Forum News--Call for Papers--Issues 14 and 15

2009-05-01T09:20:00.006-04:00

Rouge Forum News, Issue 14: Call for papers.

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 14 of the RF News will be dedicated to papers delivered at the Rouge Forum Conference at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, MI: http://www.rougeforumconference.org/.

Conference presenters, if you would like your paper to be considered for Issue 14, please send your essay to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu by June 15, 2009.

Rouge Forum News, Issue 15: Call for papers.

The Rouge Forum News is an outlet for working papers, critical analysis, and grassroots news. Issue 15 will be dedicated to our persistence in providing links between runaway capital, the rabid and rapid standardization of curriculum, the co-optation of our unions, the militarization of our youth, and the creep of irrationalism in our schools.

We are interested in work from academics, parents, teachers, and students: teachers at all levels, students in ANY grade, parents of children of any age.

Something small, something big, something serious. It is the stories we get from people like you that make the RF News what it is. If you have a story to share, but would like to protect your identity, use a pen name. Pen names are ALWAYS welcome!

We NEED Art! Songs! Poems! Editorial cartoons! Links to online videos or other material!

We are looking for narratives, as well as research, and the interplay between research and practice which focuses on the economy, curriculum, unions, etc. If you have a story to tell, some research to share, a book to review, we'd love to see it (and share it).

We publish material from k-12 students, parents, teachers, academics, and community people struggling for equality and democracy in schools --- writing (intended to inform/educate, or stories from your classroom, etc.), art, cartoons, photos, poetry. You can submit material for the RF News via email (text attachment, if possible) to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu. PLEASE SUBMIT BY AUGUST 15, 2009.

See Issue 13 of the RF News here: http://richgibson.com/rouge_forum/newspaper/spring2009/index.html and all past issues at http://www.rougeforum.org/.

Rouge Forum Update--May Day--from Rich

2009-05-01T09:10:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

It is nearly Mayday, the international workers holiday. Since the massive 2006 immigrant rights marches, what amounted to the biggest general strike in the last seventy years, Mayday is finally restored to the US, where it began. For far too many years, it was replaced by Law Day (imposed in the fifties), a day when people were supposed to celebrate the tyranny of property laws.

Now around the US students, kids, workers, educators, community people, and organizers will hit the streets and rally again. School workers can support the kids who are likely to take the lead in walking out of school, joining the many scheduled marches in the struggle for equality and social justice. And we can join them.

The Rouge Forum has celebrated Mayday for the last eleven years. Here is our traditional flyer http://www.richgibson.com/mayday.htm

And an update for our current context
http://www.richgibson.com/rouge_forum/CutbackFightbackFlyer.pdf

And a link to the music and lyrics of the Internationale http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/int/int.html

Hope to see you at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, May 15 to 17. www.rougeforum.org

best
r
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.

Rouge Forum Update--4/26/09--from Rich

2009-05-01T09:05:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

Educators attending the Rouge Forum Conference (May 15-17, Ypsilanti, Michigan) can now gain Continuing Education Units for attending conference sessions. Please spread the word. Thanks to Joe Bishop and the Michigan work group for this big step forward.

Links to the current issue of the Rouge Forum News and conference details are here: http://richgibson.com/rouge_forum/

This week in the schools: Sacramento holds segregated assemblies to promote racist high-stakes exams: http://www.sacbee.com/education/story/1799186.html

Laguna Creek Principal Doug Craig said dividing the students by race allowed staff to talk about test scores without making any one ethnic group feel singled out in a negative manner. "Is it racist? I don't believe it is," Craig said.

Poway AFT Local Leads Southern California in Making Concessions: Concessions don't save jobs. Like giving blood to sharks, concessions only make bosses want more. It should be no surprise that the Poway district is represented by the worst union in the USA, the American Federation of Teachers, but it is of little matter now. The Poway union now sets the table for the rest of SoCal and especially San Diego. Nobody should follow their lead. http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/apr/23/bn23powcut163430/?education&zIndex=87564&disqus_reply=8639982#comment-8639982

Controversial Stanford Study on Big Tests, Girls, and Minorities, by Emily Alpert: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/04/22/education/829testing042209.txt

This week on the economy: Joseph Stiglitz - One of the reasons why our economy is weak is that we have growing inequality in our society. That means that people who would spend the money don't have it. We sustained their consumption by lending but that lending was unsustainable and so unless we do something about the underlying inequalities both within our countries and across the world, it may be difficult to restore the global economy to the kind of prosperity that we would hope.

Reich: We are not at the beginning of the end: http://www.truthout.org/041309R

GM and Chrysler Bankruptcy May End Pensions: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090415/AUTO01/904150364/&imw=Y

Jackknife: The collapse of the Teamsters Union: http://www.clnews.org/forums/showthread.php?t=16368

Social Inequality and Mental Health: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2009/03/15/2003438475

This week on wars and resistance:California Towns Defeat Military Recruiters: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/14/california_towns_fight_back_against_justice

Forget Star Wars, It's Back to the Little Wars: http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis144.html

Democrats and Rockefeller backed CIA Torture: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/09/democrats/

With sadness, we note the death of Lindy Blake, courageous mutineer and Vietnam war resister: http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/12572

"The sky is, of course, falling. We are lambs among wolves. The core issue of our time is the relationship of rising color-coded social and economic inequality challenged by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance." http://rikowski.wordpress.com/tag/e-wayne-ross/

Thanks to Amber, Adam, Gina, Wayne, Dave, Kevin, Beau, Vanessa, Cheri, Donna, Kelly, Sarah, Marisol, Ernesto, Candace, Sally, Sandy, Ann, Ruthie, Della, Jose, Greg and Katie, Joe B, Paula, Alfie, Steve R and Rick C, Bill, and Glenn.

See you in Ypsi!

All the best andgood luck to us,
every one.

r

Rouge Forum Update--4-14-09--from Rich

2009-04-15T14:10:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum No Blood for Oil web page is updated at: http://www.richgibson.com/noblood.html

There you will also find links to the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the new Spring Issue of the Rouge Forum News, the only radical education publication in the US.

The conference schedule is linked herehttp://www.rougeforumconference.org/

Let's break this update in parts: Upcoming Action, Current Conditions, and Resources.

Upcoming Actions:
In California and some other states, we are on the brink of test season and, perhaps, boycotts. Opt out of the tests. Tell parents and kids. Walk away. Set up freedom schooling where kids can learn, again, how to learn.

March on Mayday! Mayday, the International Workers' Holiday, started well over 100 years ago but it was given new life in the US (where the government had declared it "Obedience to Law Day") three years ago when immigrant rights activists created some of the largest demonstrations in the last 30 years. This year, it is more than likely youths will pour out of schools to join the marches. We should all be on the march, and supporting kids who rightly say that marching on Mayday is more important than the testing drill and kill that goes on in school that day. Here is the Rouge Forum Flyer from last year: http://www.richgibson.com/rouge_forum/CutbackFightbackFlyer.pdf

Current Conditions:
You would never know it from the complete silence from the AFL-CIO and NEA on the reality of 650,000 layoffs in the last month, but workers all over the world are fighting back. In Greece, there was a general strike. In France, uprisings sparked by students and teachers, building seizures, bosses kidnapped. In Italy, hundreds of thousands of people marched against the right wing government.

And in Thailand Protestors Smash Rich Folks Meeting in Thailand: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/world/asia/12thai.html?hp

It is class war. An international war of the rich on the poor with the poor children of each nation fighting poor children of other nations, on behalf of the rich. The core issue of our times is rising color coded inequality vs the potential of mass class conscious resistance.

World Unemployment to Boom in 2009: ILO http://wotnews.com.au/like/ilo_predicts_dramatic_increase_in_global_unemployment_in_2009/2988035/

Here is Howard Zinn on class in America: Video: http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3534

States Slash Social Programs: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/us/12deficit.html?hp, but $10.9 trillion went to the banks so far. DPS to Cut 600 and Close 23 Schools : http://www.detnews.com/article/20090409/SCHOOLS/904090410/DPS+to+cut+600++close+23+schools

The banking crisis deepens as the contradiction between accumulation and consumption sharpens, the banks interested in profits alone and the consumers unable to buy, "said Frank Pallotta, a former mortgage trader at Morgan Stanley, now a consultant to institutional investors. “If every bank was forced to sell at the market-clearing price, you’d have only five banks left in the market." http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/business/economy/11bank.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

New School Students Seized a Building and the Cops Attacked: http://www.newschoolinexile.com/

Gutting and Selling the US Manufacturing Base http://www.detnews.com/article/20090409/METRO08/904090411/Selling+off+America+s+manufacturing+might++a+factory+at+a+time

Quote from the end of the article: Suter was cleaning out a tool shed that might have some resale value to some yuppie who collects such things. He pulled out a bound contract from 2000 between the UAW and The Company. He read from Article V Section 1: "The Union reaffirms its adherence to the principle of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, and agrees to use its best efforts toward this end ..." "If only everybody would have lived up to their end of the bargain," he said. And then he tossed the contract in the garbage.

How the "New Labor Movement" Would Mirror GM's Failed Structure: http://www.laboreducator.org/laborsvoice24.htm

The PIRATES! spectacle. We are being lied to again: PIRATES! http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html

The Obamagogue, Torture Enabler, by Ted Rall: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22390.htm

Prove again that you are a good teacher, the New Mexico Model: http://mail.bellarmine.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.freep.com/article/20090413/NEWS06/904130367/What%2Bmakes%2Ban%2Beffective%2Bteacher ?

Tomgram: Michael Klare, Boom Times for Criminal Syndicates http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175055/michael_klare_boom_times_for_criminal_syndicatesResources:

Political Economy For Beginners: http://www.richgibson.com/POLIECO.html

Meszaros on the Great Financial Crisis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAxa82-ZQQY

And a quote worth remembering: "Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again.

Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began--in the ditch of a crisis... The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society... The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations.

It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance... For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour power."
(Frederick Engels's--- Socialism: Utopian and Scientific/ part of Anti Dühring/ New York: International Publishers, 1935, pages 64-65)

Congratulations to Fred Jerome for his new book: Einstein on Israel and Zionism: http://www.einsteinonisrael.com/homepage.html

With sadness, the death of Mark Fidrych: http://www.freep.com/article/20090413/COL08/90413076

Fun: The Fox Tea Bag Problem: http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001140/S

Song: The Internationale, for Mayday: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ8DhXgPjfg

Thanks to Amber, Joe B and the entire committee for the conference, Adam and Gina, Wayne, Perry, Figora, Donnie A., Milt R, Peter M, Steve R, Ricky C, Sue H, Penny, Dan H, Jim3, Phillip, Gordon, Natalia, Harry K, Kathy K, Jim B, Kim B, Pam R, Tony H, Tommie and Bob, and Nereyda.

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
r

Rouge Forum Update--4-9-09--from Rich

2009-04-09T14:59:00.002-04:00

[Check out the RF News here]

Dear Friends,

For those teaching or learning about the current depression, here are some more good sources:

*Lewis Corey's outstanding 1934 book, Decline of American Capitalism, is online free at http://www.marxists.org/archive/corey/1934/decline/index.html
*How Goldman Sachs was at the Center of the Oil Trading Fiasco that Bankrupted SemGroup: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0413/096-sachs-semgroup-goldman-goose-oil.html
*The auto crisis, likely leading to the bankruptcy of GM (and the end of retiree health benefits, etc.) but this is also an indicator of the power of finance capital over industrial capital and the shift to the corporate state as US society decays: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/business/31assess.html?_r=1&hp
*Stiglitz on State Capitalism as Robbing Workers: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/opinion/01stiglitz.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
*Updated interview with John Bellamy Foster: http://democracyandclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2009/03/interview-with-john-bellamy-foster-of.html
*Bello's Primer on the Meltdown: http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/bello031008.html
* The Economist on the Huge Fraud Beneath the Fiscal Crisis: Missing the Deeper Fraud; Exploited Labor. http://rawstory.com//printstory.php?story=15090
**Five Million Jobs Lost So Far This Depression http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/business/economy/04jobs.html

Current Developments:

*Centinela CalfiorniaTeachers Wildcat Strike http://www.dailybreeze.com/latestnews/ci_12034343
*Al Sharpton and the Ruling Class http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/04/pols_press_part.php
*Labor Bosses Forge Unity Committee: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/07/AR2009040703222.html

The plum here is the dues from 3.5 million education workers, members of the National Education Association who will quickly learn that they are funding yet another layer of enemies.

Criticism of "Progressive" Warmongers: The term "progressive" may have no meaning anymore. If it is Move.on, that means slavish support for the demagogue, Obama. If it is United For Peace and Justice, it means the same thing in shifty terms.

UFPJ's recent Wall Street demos, deliberately set up to counter demands from rank and filers to demonstrate on the anniversary of the war, failed completely. This is nothing to gloat about even though we said, years ago, that following UFPJ would do just this.

Still, it is tragic.

Less than 10,000 people demonstrated, down from the one million who hit the streets six years ago. But numbers are not everything. UFPJ trumped that by teaching people nothing at all important about why things are as they are, what to do in order to develop grand strategy (peace, justice, equality, freedom, etc.) or strategy (how to understand specific local circumstances and to seek out choke points where people can use powerful direct action moves) and tactics (particular actions that link these three elements).

Why would that be? Because UFPJ is run by remnants of the Communist Party USA, people who have never sought to build a mass class conscious movement and who have always fought those who try. The current Rouge Forum News has a very fine article by Tom Suber about the wreckage that UFPJ leadership is creating. http://blogs.ubc.ca/ross/2009/04/rouge-forum-news-issue-13/

Let us be clear. The core issue of our time is accelerating color coded inequality met by the potential of organized mass class conscious resistance. Neither the CP nor UFPJ want any part of that.

Here is a sampling of UFPJ's failures: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/04/content_11129335.htm http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jPati7jbLo532dVb5D55XbX9T3bgD97B8IUG0 http://uk.reuters.com/article/marketsNewsUS/idUKN0335443120090403 The task at hand is ours. The $10.9 trillion dollars the corporate state just printed for the banks and insurance companies is going to come from the lives and labor of someone. Either it will come from the ruin of hundreds of thousand of poor and working people, or, if we fight back, it can come from the rich. Let them suffer and pay, as they should. The degree of the pain will be determined by the levels of our real resistance in schools, in communities, at work places, and in the military. When they say Cut Back; We should say Fight Back.

This is a critique from Antiwar.com: Progressive Warmongers: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/04/07/progressive-warmongers/

We note with sadness the death of a friend, Janet Jagan http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/30/janet-jagan-guyana-america-marxist

Thanks to Joe and Charles B., Steve and all the sharp eyes who caught the misspelled word in the last update (argh), Adam, Gina, Greg and Katie, Wayne, Sandra, Colin, Josh and M, Suber (s), the Sally's, Penny and Rick, Doug and Connie, Betty, Joe C, Susan O and H, Ginny H, Jim S, Ricky C., Chris, Carol Panetta, Sharon A, David, Donnie A, the Breedloves, and the entire RF Steering Committee and folks working on the upcoming conference. http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
r

The Rouge Forum News -- Issue 13 -- spring, 2009

2009-04-07T09:13:00.006-04:00

Friends.

The Rouge Forum News is back. Check out our restart issue, #13, here.

Download a PDF version of the Rouge Forum News (#13), here.

Issue #14 will collect the wide range of papers from the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti at Eastern Michigan University, May 14-17: www.rougeforumconference.org. Join us there if you can!

Stay tuned for the call for papers for Issue #15.

In the meantime, enjoy the latest issue. And, as always, we would welcome your feedback.

Rouge Forum Update--3-29-09--from Rich

2009-04-03T10:49:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

A reminder of the outstanding Rouge Forum Conference, Education, Empire, Economy and Ethics at the Crossroads, May 15 to 17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at Eastern Michigan U. http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

This is the only education-based conference in North America that will seriously take up questions of economic collapse, perpetual war, and the booming rise of inequality and irrationalism--and what to do. Keynote speaker, Staughton Lynd, will address the question at hand: What is to be done?

A blast from the past sets up our current condition: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery." Dickens speaking for Micawber in David Copperfield. The Obamagogue: "But one of the most important lessons to learn from this crisis is that our economy only works if we recognize that we're all in this together, that we all have responsibilities to each other and to our country." March 24 2009.

Let us be clear: The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and agenda to mask class war, a war of the rich on the poor which the rich clearly recognize and the poor do not---yet. The most important less is we are NOT all in this together. The core issue of our times is the accelerated rise of color-coded inequality met by the potential of mass class conscious resistance. The promise of perpetual war is every bit as real as it was with Bush. The same bankers who produced this very real economic crisis, collapse, are the bankers of the Obama regime. His transparent demagoguery has not worn out yet, but it may soon as the wars are lost and the economy spins into either deflationary chaos or the almost equally ruinous alternative: rampant inflation. Here we see firms using bailout money to bribe the political class: http://www.newsweek.com/id/190363

Is it hard for liberals to hold up their notion of democracy inside what is now clearly a capitalist democracy, the former overwhelming the latter, while the near seamless merger of the corporations and banks with the political class is finalized? No it is not. Why? Rolling Stone on "The Wall Street Revolution" : http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/7

George Soros Sees No Bottom to World Financial Collapse http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51K0A920090221

Quotes From the Great Depression--note the parallels http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/2009/03/great-depression-quotes-1929-vs-2008-1.html

Here are two pieces on what can happen if class conscious resistance does not begin to materialize:
*Fights break out at auto dealership as jobs are lost: http://www.freep.com/article/20090328/BUSINESS06/90328025/Fights+break+out+as+auto+dealership+closes *Preparing for Civilian Unrest In America: Michel Chossudovsky http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12793

On the upside, resistance and red flags are flying in France: Academic and student anger grows; The nation's universities continued to be disrupted by strikes and protests against proposed teacher training reforms last week, while university presidents called for a year's delay in introducing the changes to allow time for reflection and consultation. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20090320100214606

On the downside, because of grotesque misleadership from groups like United For Peace and Justice, the potential of a million people in the streets in the US six years ago opposing the wars, only 5-10,000 turned up on the anniversary this year: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/21/AR2009032101368.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Could sanity be peeping up in this mire of crises in the US ? Some districts are limiting homework: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-homework22-2009mar22,0,5760396.story?track=rss

Wayne Ross and I have a piece under consideration at Z Mag: The Education Agenda is a War Agenda: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20965 http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-border25-2009mar25,0,761284.story

Is it not odd that DHS is going right into Mexico? "Through "strategic redeployments," the Department of Homeland Security plans to send more than 360 officers and agents to the border and into Mexico, Napolitano said. Costs across the board, totaling up to $184 million, will be revenue neutral, funded by realigning from less urgent activities, fund balances, and, in some cases, reprogramming, she said. "And is it not odd that troops are going to be sent to the US side of border areas to do police work???????

Two sources to add to John Bellamy Foster's current book, "The Great Financial Crisis," are classics: Dunayevskaya: Outline of Marx's Capital: http://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1979/outline-capital/index.htm This is a terrific teaching tool.

Lewis Corey's (aka Louis Fraina) book, "The Decline of American Capitalism," written in 1932, arranges an understanding of the present collapse in notable, prescient, detail. Only a very few reasonably priced books are left in print.

The Rouge Forum Blog is up and you are welcome to join it. http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/

And in hopes that this week we can leave 'em laughing: South Park on the Economy: http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/220760

SNL: Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford??!! http://consumerist.com/consumer/clips/snl-skit-dont-buy-stuff-you-cant-afford-252491.php

A modern, roaring, version of L'Internationale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx7A3UYKXj4

Thanks to Susan, Perry, Steve, Wayne, Amber, Doug S, Joe B, Kenny, Sherry, Matt, Victoria, Joe C, Adam and Gina, Bob, Victoria, Tommie, Michael, David, Sharon A., Della, Barbara, Faith, Denny, Jim B, Kim B, Gil, Ernesto, Angel, Jackie, Ann, Candy, GF, Peter, Ricky, Steve, Dennis, Kirk, TC, Bob S, John and Mary, Mary and Paul, and to adjuncts everywhere.

Good luck to us, every one.

r

(more news on those Seattle teachers who resisted testing their students next week)

Finance oligarchy captures US government; US government preps for civil unrest

2009-04-01T16:49:00.005-04:00

[Cross-posted from Where the Blog Has No Name]

The conventional wisdom, to this point, has been that current economic crisis cannot be as bad as The Great Depression. Conventional wisdom is apparently changing.

Last week, renowned investor George Soros said the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros believes the current economic crisis has created more severe turbulence than the Great Depression and former Fed chairman Paul Volker, speaking at the same conference at Columbia University, agrees: "I don't remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world," Volcker said.

Referring to events in Septmeber 2008, when Lehman Brothers went under, Soros said, "We witnessed the collapse of the financial system. It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."

The bailout money is being abused in a number of ways, all of which recycle bailout cash back to corporate elites and the political class:

* Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has criticize AIG, not for using bailout cash to give huge bonuses to its executives, but for repaying, in full, its investment banking partners—steering additional federal dollars to Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and others when they already were already being propped up by Washington.

* And, Newsweek reports that filings with the Federal Election Commission reveal that the political action committees of five big TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) recipients doled out $85,300 to members of Congress in the first two months of this year—with most of the cash going to those who serves on committees who oversee the TARP program. For example,

"Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG "counterparty."

But Spitzer and Newsweek are talking small potatoes compared to the Simon Johnson's assessment of the current economic crisis. In "The Quite Coup" (The Atlantic, March 2009), Johnson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, says that that the finance industry has "effectively captured our government" not through violence or bribes (Abramoff and K Street notwithstanding), but

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

What we have is an ideological coup. The government quite clearly acting as the executive committee of the rich. Johnson explains why we have been been denied the pleasure of of seeing fat cats jumping out of Wall Street skyscrapers—the financial oligarchy remains in control, blocking essential reforms and continuing to push us toward the Greatest Depression.

Johnson's article is the most clearly reasoned, knowledgeable, and accessible piece I've read on root causes of the current crisis and he presents a "tried and true" strategy for solving it too—IMF shock therapy. He likens the U.S. economic and financial crisis to what has been seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets) like South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again).

In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

The financiers who created the crisis with the able assistance of Wall Street alumni in government (particularly ex-Goldman Sachs executives who have been ensconced at the Treasury Department for multiple administrations) are now, according to Johnson, "using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them." Well, the financiers are the government.

For Johnson the two major, interrelated problems are the banking sector "that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate" and "a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support." On the former, he suggests the IMF's nationalization approach. On the latter, Johnson suggests replacing our current elites, with a new batch. Hmm.

While Johnson's analysis is compelling, his solutions, unsurprisingly, aren't—two scenarios: IMF approach solves the problem or catastrophic global depression smartens up the elites).

Meanwhile the US government moves forward to on plans to use the military to control civil unrest as a result of the collapsing economy, as legislation to establish internment camps on US military bases has been introduced into the House of Representatives.

Doesn't look to me like the finance oligarchy is planning to step down any time soon.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda

2009-03-29T16:36:00.002-04:00

See Rich Gibson's and Wayne Ross's essay on Znet: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/20965.

Rouge Forum Update--3-20-09--from Rich

2009-03-25T13:18:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

On this sixth anniversary of the terrorist attack on Iraq, let us all bring friends to the streets on Saturday to demonstrate that there is still a thread of sanity and resistance in the USA. The war agenda is an education agenda as well.

Please remember to spread the word about the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The full conference schedule is now up here: http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html You'll have a tough time deciding what outstanding sessions you want to attend. Be there---or square!

In a speech on March 18th, The Obamagogue declared forthrightly, as he has in the past, that he is for capitalism, for free marketeering, for pay for added value. That's a pretty clear statement about why it is he is for the spurious merit pay project as it fits neatly with the agonies of the failed system of capital, with obscuring the reality of a full scale attack of the rich on the poor using the government, now almost fully merged with corporations, as a weapon against children and teachers. The education agenda is a war agenda. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0318/p01s02-ussc.htm

Here is what The Obamagogue, who now represents not only the seamless merger of corporate and governance life, but who obliterates the line between news and entertainment, said to Jay Leno that was actually significant http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/20/what-obama-said-last-nigh_n_177401.html

The Obamagogue, whose demagoguery is no longer an amusement, proposes to tax those who have health benefits in order to pay for those who do not: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/politics/15health.html

The Florida Education Association followed the lead of the California Teachers Association in demanding a state sales tax hike to pay for education, an opportunist move that pits one set of working people, educators, against the entire working class which carries the burden of sales taxes. http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/article984475.ece

As the economy presses down, resistance rises. At issue is whether people make any sense of resistance. The French General Strike of March 19th: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7951949.stm

Immanuel Wallerstein on the possibility of Civil War in the USA http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/253en.htm

What happened to the economy? Easy. Micawber from Dickens' David Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery." Joe Bishop, Rouge Forum Conference Coordinator, on inequality and education: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2009/03/accountability-legerdemain-and-the-intensification-of-inequality/

A survey on American Individualism in the midst of the crisis from Faith: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/17/surveys-americans-grip-to_n_175618.html

Closing with an excerpt from a note from Brazil: "In the history of crises of capitalism, the dominant classes, owners of capital, and their governments have adopted the same prescription to exit them. First, they need to destroy a part of (over-accumulated) capital (lacking demand) to make room for another process of accumulation. In recent months, over 4-trillion dollars in paper money have gone up in smoke. Second, they call for wars. War is a way of destroying goods (weapons, munitions, materials, facilities) and getting rid of the social tension of workers. And it does so in such a way as to also eliminate the industrial reserve army. Thence the First and Second World Wars, and then the Cold War. Now, given the fear of atomic bombs, they stir up regional conflicts instead. The attacks on the Palestinian people by Israel, the provocations in India, and the threats against Iran all fit in this strategy as well. The strategy is to increase military spending and destroy goods. Third, magnify the exploitation of workers. That is to say, in crises, lower the average wages, and bring down the living standards and thus the costs of the reproduction of the labour force, in order to restore the rates of surplus value and restart accumulation. Hence also the expansion of unemployment, which keeps multitudes surviving only on the basic baskets of goods, etc. Fourth, a greater transfer of capital from the periphery to the center of the system. This is accomplished by the direct transfer from enterprises in the periphery to their headquarters, as well as through the manipulation of the dollar exchange rate, the payment of interests, and the manipulation of prices of goods sold and bought in the periphery. Fifth, capital goes back to using the state as the manager of the savings of the population to shift these funds for the benefit of capital. For this purpose, capitalists again valorize the state, not as the caretaker of the interests of society, but as the steward of their interests, to use its compulsory powers and thus collect money from everyone, through taxes as well as savings deposited in the banks, in order to finance their way out of the crisis. We are witnessing the application of these classic measures, reported in the press every day – here in Brazil, in the center of capitalism, and in the rest of the world.But, as with everything in life, there are always contradictions. For each action of capital, the government, etc., there will be its contradiction, which society and workers can recognize and exploit to change the situation.The historic periods of crises are also periods of change. For better or worse, there will be changes! Crises create openings and rearrange the positioning of classes in society."

Thanks to Joe, the Bills, Faith, Wayne, Amber, Erica, Bob, Tobie, Sally, Sandy, Rudy, David, Sharon A., Carol Panetta and Bob too, Duke, Adam and Gina, Candace, Randy Matthews, Matt, Ken, Barb, Linda L. Gil, and Sherry.

Good luck to us, every one.
best
r

Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads (conference schedule)

2009-03-19T13:13:00.006-04:00

The schedule for the Rouge Forum Conference 2009—Education, Empire, Economy & Ethics at a Crossroads—is now online. Check out the great speakers, sessions and events for the meeting at Eastern Michigan University, May 15-17.

Check out all the details for the conference at RougeForumConference.org

As the economic crisis sparks upheaval globally, analysts fear possibility of class war in the USA

2009-03-18T19:59:00.004-04:00

[Cross posted from Where the Blog Has No Name]

As global capitalism implodes there is has been a marked uptick in social upheaval worldwide and now establishment analysts are expressing their concerns about "class conflict" and "civil war" in the USA.

The Economic Meltdown Sparks Global Unrest

The financial crisis has sparked unrest globally and particularly across Europe, with demonstrations, strikes, and protests in 16 European countries. Here are a just a few examples:

Tens of thousands of workers marched in Lisbon, Portugal on March 13 against the policies of the Socialist government, which unions say are increasing unemployment and favoring the rich at a time of crisis;

Hundreds of workers at Bulgaria's Kremikovtzi steel mill protested on March 9 over planned lay-offs and unpaid salaries, demanding the Socialist-led government find a buyer for the insolvent plant; thousands of police officers marched in Sofia on Sunday to demand a 50 percent wage rise and better working conditions;

In Greece, the fatal police shooting of a 15-year old in December sparked the country's worst riots in decades, fueled by anger at economic hardships and youth unemployment. Anarchists and left wing guerrilla groups have followed up with a wave of attacks against banks and police; Greek unions, representing about 2.5 million workers, have also staged repeated protests against the government saying its measures to tackle the global crisis only burden the poor;

Last month over 100,000 people marched against cutbacks in Ireland.

High unemployment rates have led to protests in Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

Last month, a half-million Mexican truckers shut down the countries highways to protest high fuel prices.

In December, Russian riot police busted up protests in Vladivostok against new taxes intended to "help prop up Russia's domestic car industry and prevent people buying cheaper, imported products." BBC reports that the protests were fuelled by the severe impact of the global economic crisis on Russia. According to Newsweek, "the Russian Interior Ministry set up a special command center in Moscow, packed with surveillance equipment designed to deal with street unrest. The Duma, on Kremlin instructions, added seven new articles to the criminal code including a law that makes "participating in mass disorders" such as the one in Vladivostok a 'crime against the state.'" 800,000 Russians lost their jobs in December and January, making the total number of unemployed more than 6 million or 8.1 percent. Gennady Gudkov, former KGB colonel and current chair of the Duma's security committee, said, "We are expecting mass unemployment and mass riots. There will be not enough police to stop people's protests by force."

There a have been massive general strikes in the French territories of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Réunion. The general strike in Guadeloupe prompted the French government to fly in riot police (Guadeloupe is a French "overseas department" in the Caribbean). And while the general strike lasted 6 weeks—it ended on March 4 with an agreement among the strike collective, the employers federation and local and French governments, which granted 20 of the strikers primary demands and set out negotiations on a long list of remaining issues—strikes and protests continue, involving tens of thousands of workers.

The agreement to end the Gaudeloupe strike , called the “Jacques Bino Accord”, identifies the underlying cause of discord as “the present economic and social situation existing in Guadeloupe [that] results from the perpetuation of the model of the plantation economy”. An economy “based on monopoly privileges and abuses of dominant positions that generate injustices.” The accord calls for an end to these obstacles “by establishing a new economic order enhancing the status of everyone and promoting new social relationships”.

Just as the general strike ended in Guadeloupe, social unrest over economic conditions spread to Réunion (a French "overseas department" in the Indian Ocean).

There is a definite pattern developing world wide. And now, US elites are starting to worry about what might happen if the American workers take action as a result of their frustrations with massive economic inequalities.

USA Prepares for Class War

In his latest monthly commentary (Mar. 15, 2009, Commentary No. 253), sociologist and world-systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein discusses the breakdown of taboos as the world's economy continues to disintegrate.

He notes, for example, that "nationalization" of banks and industry is now being seriously discussed by establishment intellectuals and analysts such as Alan Greenspan, Senator Lindsay Graham, and economist Alan Blinder.

But Wallerstein's most dramatic example of the breakdown of taboos is the open discussion of the possibility of class war breaking out in the USA. Wallerstein says that "after hearing nationalization proposals by arch-conservative notables, we are now hearing serious discussions about the possibilities of civil war in the United States. Zbigniew Brzezinski, apostle of anti-Communist ideology and President Carter's National Security Advisor, appeared on a morning television talk show on February 17, and was asked to discuss his previous mention of the possibility of class conflict in the United States in the wake of the worldwide economic collapse."

In Brzezinski's interview with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC about his recently published book—America and the World: Conversations on the Future of American Foreign Policy, co-authored with another former National Security Advisor (to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush) Brent Scowcroft—Brezenzki was straightforward about the belief that class war in America is real possibility:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You also talked about the possibility of class conflict.

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I was worrying about it because we’re going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America…And you sort of say to yourself: what’s going to happen in this society when these people are without jobs, when their families hurt, when they lose their homes, and so forth?

We have the government trying to repair: repair the banking system, to bail the housing out. But what about the rich guys? Where is it? [What are they] doing?

Brzezinski went on to compare the current economic meltdown to the "Panic of 1907":

It sort of struck me, that in 1907, when we had a massive banking crisis, when banks were beginning to collapse, there were going to be riots in the streets. Some financiers, led by J.P. Morgan, got together. He locked them in his library at one point. He wouldn’t let them out until 4:45 AM, until they all kicked in and gave some money to stabilize the banks: there was no Federal Reserve at the time.

Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin [former treasury secretaries]. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?

Brzezinski continued saying,

"And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!

Wallerstein points out that "almost simultaneously" LEAP/Europe a European agency that issues monthly confidential bulletins for its clients—politicians, public servants, businessmen, and investors—devoted its February issue to global geopolitical dislocation, discussing the possibility of civil war in Europe, in the United States, and Japan; and foreseeing a "generalized stampede" that will lead to clashes, semi-civil wars.

Wallerstein quotes the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin as saying:

"If your country or region is a zone in which there is a massive availability of guns, the best thing you can do...is to leave the region, if that's possible."

And Wallerstein also points out that, "the only one of these countries which meets the description of massively available guns is the United States. The head of LEAP/Europe, Franck Biancheri, noted that 'there are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States, and social violence is already manifest via gangs.' The experts who wrote the report asserted that there is already an ongoing emigration of Americans to Europe, because that is 'where physical danger will remain marginal.'"

Wallerstein emphases that "these analyses are not coming from left intellectuals or radical social movements.…Verbal taboos are broken only when such people are truly fearful. The point of breaking the taboos is to try to bring about major rapid action - the equivalent of J.P. Morgan locking the financiers in his home in 1907."

And US elites are obviously fearful enough to start planning for military responses to potential social upheaval as a result of the collapsing economy.

Last November, the US War College's Strategic Studies Institute posited a number of “strategic surprises” that the country should be prepared for, including potential for disruption and violence caused by the economy's failure. The report Known Unknowns: Unconventional 'Strategic Shocks' in Defense Strategy Development, says “widespread civil violence inside the US would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

And now, for the first time ever, US military units are staged and are training inside the country to address civil unrest rising from inequality. The Army Times has reported on the US Northern Command's (NORTHCOM) deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Combat Brigade Team (BCT) on U.S. soil for "civil unrest" and "crowd control" duties. The 5,000-member force was one of first units deployed in Baghdad.

Rouge Forum Update--3-15-09--from Rich

2009-03-18T10:01:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

The Rouge Forum Conference, May 15-17, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, is lining up to be a terrific event. Come meet friends, hear keynoters like Staughton Lynd ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staughton_Lynd) and get ready for a falling sky.

The RF conference link is here:http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html Please help spread the word about the conference. It looks like our best yet. The lineup of presentations is terrific. You will have a hard time picking which ones you want to attend. The conference will set the north star for education resistance for yet another year. This is our eleventh conference. Time flies.

The Seattle special ed teachers who were suspended for refusing to give their students high-stakes exams that would invariably fail them are back in the classroom and working with a lawyer on their appeal. A note of encouragement would be more than appropriate---solidarity with the notion that an injury to one just goes before an injury to all. Juli Griffith mrjulig@gmail.com ,Lenora Stahl lenorastahl3@gmail.com

It was a loud and busy week in education. The One, who we dubbed The Obamagogue, in somewhat good humor, came out in favor of merit pay and a series of regressive educational measures (more regimented curricula, more sophisticated testing) summed up herehttp://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iT--F725ypsNTaNrulnuCGd8vt0QD96RAIQ00

The bosses of the National Education Association (paid upwards of $450,000 a year aside from expense accounts) joined their favorite bedfellows, the US Chambers of Commerce and the National Association of manufactures, to promote, among other things, a national curriculum. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/03/10/25nea.h28.html?tkn=QSBFnpGMU6Tfz%2B90MDHbx3VHgcuRaEAiouMd

The group hug of business profiteers, labor bosses, and government hacks went on to support what many people feel is the utterly out of date, pre-sky-falling, litany of what's been called the Tough-Tough Project http://www.skillscommission.org/executive.htm

Then Tim Geithner and Arne Duncan went on the road to promote The One's projects. Here is a report on The Obamagogue's Liars and Our Future http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=649

Let us be clear. The education budget is a war budget. The core issue of our times is booming color-coded inequality challenged by the potential of rising mass class conscious resistance, in schools and out. There is continuing debate about the Employee Free Choice Act, now pending before congress and drawing about $200 million in lobbying money---both sides, labor and management combined--in a struggle that may not be exactly about the best interests of workers or the nation, though all the big players say otherwise. Here is a link to the discussion in the Historians Against the Warhttps://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=36687254&postID=5819545599056544064&pli=1

There are many demonstrations coming this week around the US and the world. This week marks the sixth year of the US invasion of Iraq, a failed adventure propelled by hubris, oil, regional control, and deception--a mix that could spell tyranny. All who can should be on the march, not only to raise a peace sign, a fist, or a finger, against this travesty, but to test our own strength and resolve.

Remember to spread the word about the conference in Ypsi!.

Want to explain Madoff and a Ponzi scheme to your kids? http://ukhousebubble.blogspot.com/2009/03/bernie-madoff-is-cookie-monster.html

$9.7 trillion to the banksters and still counting. Here are some good Great Depression Songs to get us through the week. http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/depress.html

Good luck to us every one.

Thanks to Joe B and C, Greg and K, The Bill's, Bob A and D, Erica, Donna, Shelly, Ann Arbor Ann, Candace, Niki N, Sharon A, Amber, Wayne, Perry, Kev, Curry, M...Y...,Hanna and Cal, Kelly, Elaine, Dominique, Luis, Tanya, Summer, Paul and Mary, Alex and Jeff, Gil G, Kirk, Jimmy B and G, Kathy Young, and Z's.

All the best,

r

Rouge Forum Update--3-10-09--from Rich

2009-03-11T14:17:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

There is still time to submit a proposal for the Rouge Forum Conference. Come enjoy the company of sane people.http://www.rougeforumconference.org/

Is it trite to say that the class war that we noticed, among a very few others, years ago, rages now, in schools and out? Surely, elites know it, even if too many on our side don't.

Bloomberg News group seems to be the only section of the corporate press truly interested in tracking where the $9.7 billion(+) bailout went. They filed suit and came up nearly blank: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aG0_2ZIA96TI

Secrecy, as we know, is a cornerstone of tyranny.Here we see Oregon schools gutted by the collapsing economy (better termed as Their Economy) http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oregon-schools9-2009mar09,0,3739238.story

California is, right now, issuing thousands of layoff notices to school workers. People will fight back. There is always resistance. Here are two Seattle teachers who retained their integrity by supporting their kids right to opt out of exams that were completely inappropriate for them. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/education/2008819875_suspension06m.html

The teachers were suspended. You can email your thought to the Seattle Superintendent at Randy.dorn@k12.wa.us

After months of secrecy, NEA's bosses finally advised some members that they have been working behind the scenes, again, to merge NEA's 3.5 million members with the AFL-CIO and the splinter group, Change to Win. On the face of it, solidarity might be appealing. But neither the AFL-CIO nor the CTW has ever practiced solidarity unionism. To the contrary, the labor bureaucrats have systematically disorganized workers's job actions, as with the Detroit Teachers Wildcat, and they have used violence against labor reformers, as with the SEIU attack on Labor Notes in 2008. All NEA would get would be a more undemocratic structure, a la the AFT. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/us/09labor.html?scp=1&sq=%2b%22National+Education+Association%22&st=nyt

Meanwhile, NEA mis-leaders joined AFT, the Business Roundtable, and other employer groups to promote national teaching standards, Why national standards? It is not possible to split foreign policy and domestic policy. The education budget is a war budget. The crux of the US education project is to produce students so witless, docile, loyal, yet useful, they will support the poor of their home nation going off to fight and die for the rich. Bill Blum noticed this recently when he reminded us of this quote from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, "South Pacific" "You've got to be taught" ...You've got to be taughtfrom year to year.It's got to be drummedin your dear little ear.You've got to be taughtbefore it's too late.Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.To hate all the peopleyour relatives hate.You've got to be carefully taught.http://www.nea.org/home/30696.htm

From the NEA press release: NEA partners to develop standards for measuring 21st century skills.Education collaborative strives to ensure global competitiveness for students:WASHINGTON - February 23, 2009 - NEA is pleased to announce its partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Governors Association, Achieve, Inc., the Alliance for Excellent Education, the Hunt Institute, the National Association of State Boards of Education, and the Business Roundtable, in a new state-led initiative to improve the access of every student to a complete, high-quality education that provides the skills and knowledge needed to thrive in the 21st century. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is working to produce a common core of voluntary state standards across grades. The K-12 standards would cover English/language arts, math, and eventually science. The initiative plans to be an inclusive and transparent process that will include input from education, civil rights and business leaders among others. "NEA welcomes the opportunity to participate in this effort to provide manageable, high-quality standards for adoption by states to guide efforts to improve education," said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. "We are pleased that the voices of classroom educators will now be a part of this process. ..(full article is linked)

When the bosses say Cut Back. We must say Fight Back. No Concessions. No Layoffs. No wage or benefits cuts. Cap class size at 20 for everyone. Hire more people to combat unemployment. Go get us the Schools Tarp. Or we will shut your schools down and open freedom schools, teaching things that matter: Class struggle, love, sensuality and reproduction, rational knowledge in an atmosphere that promotes critique and freedom. All of that is illegal in California right now.

Meanwhile, AFL-CIO leaders cavort and bicker at the pricey Miami Fountainbleau Hotel http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/08labor.html

David Berliner has a new piece out, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success , demonstrating once again Jean Anyon's thesis: Doing school reform without social and economic reform is like washing the air on one side of a screen door. It won't work. http://www.greatlakescenter.org/

For those who enjoy irony, here is General Motors, long the siren of Buy American, demanding a bailout, from Europehttp://www.freep.com/article/20090303/BUSINESS01/90303019

What happened to the capitalist economy anyway? Here are two quick insights, this one from old Marx himself: For Marx, there was never any doubt about the root cause of capitalist economic crises. “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit”

Here is an extension from John B. Foster, author of the recently released, Great Financial Crisis, responding to an inquiry: “No I am not equating stagnation, stagflation, and overproduction. though they overlap. Stagnation, i.e. slow growth, rising unemployment/underemployment, high excess capacity, etc. reemerged in the 1970s. Initially, there was a period of stagflation (stagnation plus inflation). The inflationary part was brought under control but not the underlying stagnation, which continued. Under monopoly capital (or monopoly-finance capital) actual overproduction is not the dominant tendency since the demand shortfalls show up in overcapacity rather than overproduction. Corporations cut back on output pretty quickly and lower their capacity utilization (fully competitive capitalism didn't work this way). You could say, though, that it is a case of implicit overproduction, so there is no real contradiction. Of course a build up of productive capacity, which is increasingly underutilized, fits just as well with Marx's statement, ‘the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself,’ which you quote.”

All of which adds up to why you should book now to join us at the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17 in Ypsilanti! Keynotes: Staughton Lynd, Greg Queen, Rebecca Martusewicz.

All the best, r

Thanks to Gil, Bob, Susan and Susan, George and fam, Paul and Mary, Cindy, Amber, Della, Evan and Ethel, Tony H, Suber, Beau, Kelly, Jan, Dionne, Sandy and Sally, Shea, Holly, Peter M, Tom H, Cassie, Jean and Ken and fam, Jim the 3rd, Travis, Dan H, Gina, Sharon Ag, Carol Panetta, and Bobby.

How Shall We Live as Lambs Among Wolves? Reason–Passion–Power and Organization. What to Do?

2009-03-11T14:10:00.000-04:00

Click comment for the full text of this recent essay from Rich Gibson.

Analyzing the collapse

2009-03-01T13:47:00.005-05:00

Similar to the discussion of Israel/Gaza/US/Hamas below, I also wanted to open up a discussion regarding the recent economic collapse.

Rich has been providing us with several links over the last few weeks which help us make sense of the causes and subsequent devestation. He has offered the following links (among others):

George Soros agrees the sky is falling: http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE51K0A920090221?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&rpc=23&sp=true
The auto bailout/UAW sellout amounts to what looks to be the coming end of auto-worker health benefits http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20090223/AUTO01/902230395
The large existing organizations that claim to defend working people and students, like the unions, are absolutely unprepared and unfit to meet this crisis. The UAW agreed to the 47,000 layoffs (having already lost a million members) and more concessions still--when concessions never save jobs, other than bosses' jobs. http://www.freep.com/article/20090217/BUSINESS01/90217064/GM+seeks+$30+billion+in+total+aid++plans+to+cut+47+000+jobs+this+year
White recession, black depression: http://www.counterpunch.org/muhammad02162009.html
Calvin and Hobbes : http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_djgssszshgM/SYXCzpR0MbI/AAAAAAAAAyY/VYle3udsueo/s1600-h/CalvinHobbs.BMP
Marx: "The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself": http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm

I would like to add to this list some of my own reading over the last few months (Rich probably sent some of these, too), which include:

"Financial Implosion and Stagnation" from John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff (this is the final chapter from The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences): http://monthlyreview.org/081201foster-magdoff.php.

In this chapter, Foster and Magdoff lay out a compelling case of how we got to where we are and what we may need to get out of it. Quoting a few passages from the chapter, there argument is: "both the financial explosion in recent decades and the financial implosion now taking place are to be explained mainly in reference to stagnation tendencies within the underlying economy."

Illustrating via some fairly frightening graphs, they claim, "Over the years 1950 to 1970, for each additional dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent of income earners, those in the top 0.01 percent received an additional $162. In contrast, from 1990 to 2002, for each added dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent, those in the uppermost 0.01 percent (today around 14,000 households) made an additional $18,000. In the United States the top 1 percent of wealth holders in 2001 together owned more than twice as much as the bottom 80 percent of the population. If this were measured simply in terms of financial wealth, i.e., excluding equity in owner-occupied housing, the top 1 percent owned more than four times the bottom 80 percent. Between 1983 and 2001, the top 1 percent grabbed 28 percent of the rise in national income, 33 percent of the total gain in net worth, and 52 percent of the overall growth in financial worth."

Regarding our economics colleagues, they argue, "Having lost any meaningful roots in society, orthodox neoclassical economics, which presented itself as a single paradigm, became a discipline dominated by largely meaningless abstractions, mechanical models, formal methodologies, and mathematical language, divorced from historical developments. It was anything but a science of the real world; rather its chief importance lay in its role as a self-confirming ideology."

Pointing toward our response, they offer, "There is no doubt that the present growing economic bankruptcy and political outrage have produced a fundamental break in the continuity of the historical process. How should progressive forces approach this crisis? First of all, it is important to discount any attempts to present the serious economic problems that now face us as a kind of “natural disaster.” They have a cause, and it lies in the system itself. And although those at the top of the economy certainly did not welcome the crisis, they nonetheless have been the main beneficiaries of the system, shamelessly enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of the population, and should be held responsible for the main burdens now imposed on society. It is the well-to-do who should foot the bill—not only for reasons of elementary justice, but also because they collectively and their system constitute the reason that things are as bad as they are; and because the best way to help both the economy and those at the bottom is to address the needs of the latter directly. There should be no golden parachutes for the capitalist class paid for at taxpayer expense. But capitalism takes advantage of social inertia, using its power to rob outright when it can’t simply rely on “normal” exploitation. Without a revolt from below the burden will simply be imposed on those at the bottom. All of this requires a mass social and economic upsurge, such as in the latter half of the 1930s, including the revival of unions and mass social movements of all kinds—using the power for change granted to the people in the Constitution; even going so far as to threaten the current duopoly of the two-party system."

And, finally, " Still, there can be no doubt that change should be directed first and foremost to meeting the basic needs of people for food, housing, employment, health, education, a sustainable environment, etc. Will the government assume the responsibility for providing useful work to all those who desire and need it? Will housing be made available (free from crushing mortgages) to everyone, extending as well to the homeless and the poorly housed? Will a single-payer national health system be introduced to cover the needs of the entire population, replacing the worst and most expensive health care system in the advanced capitalist world? Will military spending be cut back drastically, dispensing with global imperial domination? Will the rich be heavily taxed and income and wealth be redistributed? Will the environment, both global and local, be protected? Will the right to organize be made a reality?"

"Stimulus is for Suckers" by James K. Galbraith at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/12/stimulus-suckers.

In this short essay, Galbraith suggests five ways to fix the economy: (1) fix housing, (2) backstop state and local governments with federal funds, (3) support the incomes of the elderly, (4) cut taxes on working Americans, and (5) change how we produce energy, how we consume it, and how much greenhouse gas we emit.

"Why the US has really gone broke" by Chalmers Johnson at http://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military, which brings to bear our military spending.

"Capitalist Fools" by Joseph Stiglitz at http://www.truthout.org/121008R

Here, Stiglitz chronicles 5 critical decisions that have led to the current crisis: (1) Firing Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed in 1987; (2) Deregulation; (3) Bush tax cuts; (4) Faking the numbers; (5) The bailout package of 10/3/2008.

"Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse? Will an Obama Administration Reverse the Tide?" by Michel Chossudovsky at http://www.creative-i.info/?p=2059.

"Financial Meltdown and the Madness of Imperialism" by Raymond Lotta at http://www.revcom.us/a/143online/Excerpts_Meltdown-en.html.

And, "Inside the Meltdown" at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view.

What other good pieces exist out there on the meltdown? (Did This American Life just run another show with the guys that did a pretty good job outlining the bursting housing bubble?) Where has your analysis taken you? What other proposed solutions have you seen? How can we stand in solidarity?

Would love to carry this conversation into the RF Conference in May (Ypsilanti--5/14-5/17: http://www.rougeforumconference.org/)

From our 2009 RF Conference keynoter Staughton Lynd

2009-02-27T11:33:00.002-05:00

Friends,

Greetings. Alice and I have written a joint autobiography entitled Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together . We need your help in getting the book into the hands of the young people for whom it is most intended.

The book begins with a lovely Foreword by our longtime colleague, Tom Hayden. Then come chapters, some written by us both, some by one of us, some by the other. The chapters are grouped in the following sections: Beginnings (our families, Staughton as a "premature New Leftist" and Alice on "Music and Dance and Discovering Childhood," how we met and fell in love); Community (our three years in the Macedonia Cooperative Community in the hills of Georgia); The Sixties (among other matters, Mississippi Freedom Summer, a trip to Hanoi, Alice's work in draft counseling and how it planted in our minds the idea of the "two experts" -- the professionally trained person and the counselee, client or fellow struggler -- who work together); Accompaniment (how we found our way beyond the Sixties by doing oral history and then law together, with chapters on Nicaragua and Palestine); The Worst of the Worst (representing and learning from prisoners); Afterwords (a poem, retrospectives, Alice's wishes for our daughter Martha's marriage).

We had some difficulty finding a publisher. At length we signed a contract with Lexington Books. Lexington has produced an attractive hardback edition. On the front cover there is a photograph of the two of us on the day we married (looking very young) and on the back cover a picture taken at our 50th wedding anniversary.

The problem is that this hardback edition is intended for academic libraries and costs $70. Perhaps in part because of the current recession, we have been told that a paperback edition will be forthcoming only if orders from libraries are substantial .

This is where you can help. It could make all the difference in getting this book into the hands of those who will carry on from all of us if you could:

* Ask whatever libraries you are connected with -- law libraries, college or university libraries, public libraries -- to acquire Stepping Stones. The address of Lexington Books is:
Lexington Books
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite 200
Lanham MD 20706, www.lexingtonbooks.com .
There is a customer service number if desired: 800-462-6420. We can provide ISBN numbers should they be needed.

* If you are told that the library would purchase a paperback edition but cannot afford an expensive hardback copy at this time, we hope you will write to Lexington Books and tell them that.

Let's look at the bright side. If your library orders a copy, you can read the durned book for free. And if enough libraries order copies it will hopefully trigger paperback production, and together we can pass on to our successors what one Zapatista has called the hope of creating "another everything."

With thanks, love, and comradeship,

Staughton Lynd for S&A

Rouge Forum Update--2-23-09--from Rich

2009-02-25T08:58:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

Great news! Staughton Lynd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staughton_Lynd) has agreed to be a keynote speaker at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17: http://www.rougeforum.org/

Next week, more good news on the keynote topic.

Kathy Emery, expert on the Freedom Schools and, with Susan Ohanian, author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?, will be presenting in Los Angeles at the UTLA Human Rights Conference, 3303 Wilshire Blvd, March 27 and 28. http://www.utla.net/node/865

You can find a review at Book Tv on Cspan of Jeff Perry's new book Hubert Harrison, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism http://www.booktv.org/program.aspxProgramId=10134&SectionName=History

Ravi Kumar has a fine interview with Peter Mclaren linked to Radical Notes online www.atradicalnotes.com/content/view/88/39/

Resistance to inequality and injustice grows each week. From February 18th to 20th, NYU students occupied a building. They were removed and subsequently expelled. Each struggle brings its own lesson on how to better prepare. Details are herehttp://takebacknyu.com/

There is a lengthy struggle, a strike and civil uprising on Martinique http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jmweJ8SzMduOZH3iKJMPyKFo2Y5wD96E9SMG0

A bus strike may lead to a general strike in Ireland: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0219/1224241418134.html

Two big Marches in March. Most of the anti-war movement will be on the streets on March 21 to condemn the invasion of Iraq (next week a report on the decisions made by the Historians Against the War regarding Afghanistan and other imperial adventures). And there is a call nationwide to March Forth on March 4th, against the homophobia inherent in the vote on California's Prop 8.

Tougher News: George Soros agrees the sky is falling: http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE51K0A920090221?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&rpc=23&sp=true

While the auto bailout/UAW sellout amounts to what looks to be the coming end of auto-worker health benefits http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20090223/AUTO01/902230395

Joel Kovel was fired at Bard. You can review the background and offer help at http://www.joelkovel.org/

Thanks to Bonnie M, Paul, Joe B and C, Adam, Amber, Candace, Sally, Julie, Jill, Sandy, Laurel, EWR, Ravi, Don A, Ginger H, Kim B, Perry and Steve, Shelly, Kelly, Gina, Ludden, Carlson, Riley, Tommie, Bob, Dave and Sharon, Elaine H, Penny Brown, Sue, Greg and Katie, Bill B, Kevin, Paul and Mary.

All the best,
r

Rouge Forum Update--2-18-09--from Rich

2009-02-18T09:46:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

The sky is falling. The good thing, and the bad thing, is we were right about that.

Below is a short synopsis of our current context and reasons why you should plan to be at the Rouge Forum Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan, May 15 to 17. Bring friends and submit a proposal. http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html

The core issues remain inequality on the one hand and organized resistance on the other hand. Inequality booms world-wide. In the US productivity went up on a near 90 degree vertical line. But wages remained stagnant, creating classic forms of overproduction (in sum, workers unable to buy products their class produces). Simultaneously, finance capital came to dominate and almost split away from productive capital, allowing the working class to maintain a standard of living by offering endless debt and falsely inflated home values. This is the video, Capitalism Hits the Fan: http://www.vimeo.com/1962208

Finance companies began to buy on margin inside a massive Ponzi scheme of mortgage securities. Fraud leaped in: Maddoff. Finance capital, became a barrier to itself, as Marx wrote years ago, and now we have real stagnation, banks awash in capital they will not loan, huge companies unable to sell goods, and workers losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands; a downward spiral that appears to have no bottom. GM just announced another 47,000 layoffs; demanded--with Chrysler--a total of about $39 billion from US taxpayers.

The aged millionaires Lady Astor complained bitterly about how finance capital operated. She commented on her 100th birthday, "Everyone became obsessed with money in the 1990's and went higgledy-piggledy scampering after their fortunes," she said. "People with money used to often care about the people who had no money. Not always, but often. Now, it is rare to find people with money who care at all about people with no money" (New York Times, March 30, 2002).

We witness the corporate state coming into being, the merger of government, business, and the military. Nearly $3 trillion will go to the banks, another $1-2 trillion to the military soon.

This is, as Foster and Magdoff make clear in their recent Monthly Review book, the Great Financial Crisis, a predicament that cannot be solved for working people within the system of capital. If reforms are to be won, they can only be won by linking immediate reform to profound social change. Every reform will be unsustainable.

Containing populations suffering from inequality will become the prime project of ruling classes everywhere, in schools and out. We have seen massive demonstrations and strikes in Europe already, often initiated by students and teachers.

The large existing organizations that claim to defend working people and students, like the unions, are absolutely unprepared and unfit to meet this crisis. The UAW agreed to the 47,000 layoffs (having already lost a million members) and more concessions still--when concessions never save jobs, other than bosses' jobs. http://www.freep.com/article/20090217/BUSINESS01/90217064/GM+seeks+$30+billion+in+total+aid++plans+to+cut+47+000+jobs+this+year

In schools, we can foresee a sharpened effort to eliminate freedom, to sharpen the regimentation of curricula, to impose more sophisticated testing, and more militarization as well (perpetual war is real).

Here is AFT's President Randy Weingarten demanding more national education standards which will invariably tied to high-stakes exams and married to the Obama project of privatized charters. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/15/AR2009021501257.html?referrer=emailarticle

Criticism of the anti- war coalition United For Peace and Justice continues to flash around the net. Here is one of the latest if not the most troubling, attacking UFPJ's leadership for abandoning the fight to prosecute war crimes:http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/39865

Here are two pieces from Rouge Forum members regarding UFPJ http://www.richgibson.com/wheremovement.htm,
http://www.richgibson.com/icing.htm

The latest Obama Bailout remains mostly a mystery, a secret. But here is a the simple rough outline that we have seen so far, though it makes little sense as a jobs or people stimulus:http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-02-12-stimulus-plan-breakdown_N.htm

And the quick upshot: White recession, black depression: http://www.counterpunch.org/muhammad02162009.html

It is no stretch to see that we are watching the emergence of fascism, which has never solved the problems it claims to solve. Here is Chris Hedges on Inverted Totalitarianism http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090202_its_not_going_to_be_ok/

Only the Rouge Forum in the US has, in organized fashion, taken up these issues for a decade and translated research into action. We also forged a culture of friendship and mutual respect, among many differing viewpoints, that many people see as the highlight of the conference. Join us! http://www.rougeforum.org/And for a moment's relief---Calvin and Hobbes got it a long time ago: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_djgssszshgM/SYXCzpR0MbI/AAAAAAAAAyY/VYle3udsueo/s1600-h/CalvinHobbs.BMP

Thanks to Faith, Wayne, Amber, Wendy, Victoria, Tommie, Bob, Gina, Adam, Candace, Sharon Ag...., Della, Kathy Young, Bill, Greg, Emily, Don A., Jim B, Dave S, Gil G, Peter M, Vanessa, Molly, Dave S, SL, Bonnie Macintosh, Nancy S, Steve R and Ricky C, Kelly, Beau, and the Old Mole.

All the best and good luck to us, every one.
R

Rouge Forum Update--2-9-09--from Rich

2009-02-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is updated at http://www.richgibson.com/rouge_forum/. That's also the place where you'll find the call for proposals for the Rouge Forum Conference, May 15 to 17, at Eastern Michigan University.

The deadline for articles for the Rouge Forum News is March 1. Schools, k through universities, face massive cuts. What's going on in your area? Send articles, cartoons, photos, etc to Adam Renner: arenner@bellarmine.edu

Spread the word. NO CONCESSIONS. Concessions are like giving blood to sharks. It only makes bosses want more (look at the United Auto Workers). Not one step back. In fact, we want MORE. We know the bosses are weak. We want a shorter work week with no cut in pay. No Layoffs. Add another shift, cut class size. No evictions. Free health care for all. Tax the rich. Free wireless everywhere. Stop high stakes exams. Recruiters off the campuses. Academic freedom for students and teachers. (and you can make up some of your own, I am sure).

Take a look at the Rouge Forum blog and join in the discussion. If we can get that going, we can demonstrate the collective nature of our problems, which have few if any individual solutions, and share information about what people are doing. http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/

Who will get what in the "what about ME?" scramble for bailout money this time? Much of that will be set up by who paid who what. Last time the Tarp recipients spent $144 million on lobbyists. Send a check when you write congress or Obama. http://washington.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2009/02/02/daily65.html?ana=e_du_pub

The Iraq war is far from over; war in Afghanistan is expanding. The anti-war movement is split, never met the potential represented by the mass outpouring of opposition to the Iraq invasion. Still, it appears that the biggest anti-war actions will be on March 21, the sixth anniversary of the invasion (really 3/19), in cities all over the US. Here is Tom Ricks, "The Iraq war is not over," although corporate media still cannot spell O-I-L. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/08/thomas-ricks-war-in-iraq_n_165002.html

Juan Cole believes Obama may have to delay his Afghan surge as the US supply routes are cut http://www.juancole.com/2009/02/obama-may-postpone-afghan-surge-severe.html

Resistance rises world wide, if we in the US do not see a lot of it. The French general strike most recently demonstrated that students and school workers can indeed initiate and lead struggle for social justice. Here is an update from Italy.: http://www.counterpunch.org/quadrupanni02042009.html

The UTLA test boycott is still on. Let's spread this idea and expand it to ALL the high-stakes exams. http://www.utla.net/pab

Friends in Fresno are preparing to make presentations to their school board for just that purpose.

Gilbert Gonzalez is working on a video on the Bracero Program. He'd like some help.
This is a teaser videohttp://vimeo.com/2904353

Here is an opportunity to make some international connections: American Councils for Education: Seeking Fellowship PlacementsThe American Councils for Education, in association with the U.S. Department of State, is seeking to place five young professionals in non-governmental internships across the country during the fall 2009 intern season (September-December).? Prospective interns will be arriving in the United States in mid-August under the auspices of the federally funded Legislative Education and Practice program (LEAP) and will be ready to report to work in early September. LEAP Fellows are dedicated public servants between 23 and 33 years of age from Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey. They are college -educated (many have advanced degrees in law or international studies), speak fluent English, have had previous U.S.-based experience, and are eager to learn how Americans address rule of law, civil society, work in advocacy, infrastructure, energy, human rights, and related topics, so that they may better their own societies. Interns will be available to work a full-time schedule and will be fully supported by American Councils and the U.S. Department of States in terms of compensation, health insurance, etc. To learn more, please contact RaeJean Stokes at 202-833-7522 or via email at: leap@americancouncils.org

Thanks to Joe B and C, Amber, Donna, Sharyn, Erin, B and N, Bob, Susan O and H, Gene, Patrick, Harold, Bonnie, Kathy, Angie, Ravi, Bill, A and G, Karen C, Willie Himebaugh, Chuck R, Tom T, and Wayne.

Down the banks and
Up the Rebels.

best,
r

Rouge Forum Update--2-2-2009--from Rich

2009-02-04T15:20:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends,

February 12th is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Sounds like a good day to remind people about evolution, dialectics, and leaps of change! Have a party! Happy Happy Merry Merry--Charles!

A reminder: set aside May 14th to 17th for the Rouge Forum Conference at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, just minutes from the Detroit Airport. Here is the conference information and call for proposals: http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html

United Teachers of LA called for a test boycott, perhaps the first large school worker union to do so. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/teachers-plan-t.htmlThough the boycott is limited to what many RF activists feel is second-tier testing, the idea could well spread. Messages of support can go to the UTLA leadership at http://www.utla.net/node/863

In France, a general strike was kicked off by teachers and students, proving once again our long held thesis that school workers and students are well positioned to initiate, if not fully carry through, action for social justice:http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/29/strike-france-teachers

From the EdNotes blog, a video the United Federation of Teachers (NYC) would prefer that we not see (scroll down a bit) http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/

Colleague Chalmers Johson, author of the Nemisis trilogy, weighs in with "The Looming Crisis at the Pentagon,"http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175029

We all noticed that Exxon recorded the highest profits ever http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/01/news/companies/exxon_earnings/and military contractors expect no layoffs whatsoever. War, in many instances, means work. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123327750721631485.html

Bill Zucker sets up a shout, "I want some Tarp!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGfQk9XXm24

Those who wonder what their NEA union leaders and staff are paid can check EIA, a right-libertarian site, here (there are instructions on how to check on the LMR 2) http://www.eiaonline.com/archives/20090126.htm Note that NEA past president Reg Weaver took home $554,524 and he probably was able to live on his expense account.

The Rouge Forum blogspot is up and running at http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/ You are welcome to chime in!

Thanks to Eric, Kev, Wayne, Bob, Amber, Tom, Perry, Angie, Stella, O, Donnie A, Jim B, Peter M, Hannah, Beau, Dave, Tommie, Sandy, and Sherry.

All the best,
r

Test boycott! United Teachers of Los Angeles

2009-01-30T12:44:00.001-05:00

See http://www.utla.net/pab for more info.

Rouge Forum Update--1-25-09--from Rich

2009-01-27T12:32:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,

An up front reminder on the Rouge Forum Conference, May 14 to 17, in Ypsilanti Michigan. Proposals due very soon. http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html

Centered in the key organizing point of North American life, the Rouge Forum represents the only voice of the left, recognizing that at the core of our many crises, economic collapse to perpetual war and all in between, lies the system of capital. This conference represents a gathering of people who have learned that friendship can arch over political differences. Come join us!

From Monthly Review, here is one of the better economic analyses of why things are as they are in the growing depression. http://www.monthlyreview.org/081201foster-magdoff.php This is the conclusion: "In this sense we are clearly at a global turning point, where the world will perhaps finally be ready to take the step, as Keynes also envisioned, of repudiating an alienated moral code of “fair is foul and foul is fair”used to justify the greed and exploitation necessary for the accumulation of capitalturning it inside-out to create a more rational social order. 49 To do this, though, it is necessary for the population to seize control of their political economy, replacing the present system of capitalism with something amounting to a real political and economic democracy; what the present rulers of the world fear and decry mostas “socialism.” 50"

What is missing from the analysis is the dual role of war. It was war that ended the last depression, not Keynesian hyper-spending, and it is also imperialist war that lies, in part, at the base of the current deepening collapse.

And from YouTube, here is Noam Chomsky on the election, capitalist democracy (those who spend most, win, among other things) and what is next http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHD9JzXJvI&feature=related (part one of three).

The take on election results from the Daily Show: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=216538&title=changefest-09-obamas-inaugural
<http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=216538&title=changefest-09-obamas-inaugural>

Michael Klare hoping for the unlikely event; that Obama will abolish the Carter Doctrine on Mideast Oil http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5809

Reminder of the March on the Pentagon on the anniversary of the Iraq invasion, March 21, Washington DC. https://www.natassembly.org/About_Us.html

Short update this week, but plenty of reading.

Thanks to Amber, Tom, Bob, Adam and Gina, Karl, Dave, Glenn, Candy, Sharon A, Lucy, Michael, Dell, Mary, Chris, Ruthann, Paul, Zoey, Carl G, Sandy, Van, and Tina.

best
r

Rouge Forum Update--1-18-09--from Rich

2009-01-22T09:08:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,

Happy New Year!

An up front reminder: The Rouge Forum Conference is May 14 to 17, 2009, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, near Detroit. The call for proposals is here: http://web.mac.com/wayne.ross/Rouge_Forum_Conference_2009/Welcome.html The deadline is February 15 for proposals.

Why come?

What's our current context? A stock market collapse. Massive racist unemployment nearly redoubling each month. Hundreds of thousands of foreclosures and evictions. Police terror (the Oakland murder the most recent example) and immigration raids. Calls for more taxes and cuts in public services met by bankster bailouts in the trillions. Declared US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq; undeclared wars in Gaza via Israeli proxies, Colombia, and cold wars growing with Russia and China--much of that revolving around oil. In schools all over the world: regimentation of the curricula to promote nationalism, high-stakes exams eradicating freedom, and militarization.

How can this be described as other than class war, an international war of the rich on the poor?

Now comes Obama promising Hope! and Change!

Probably not. His appointees alone say otherwise, all of them beholden to nearly the same oil bosses, war-makers, and financiers who propelled Clinton and Bush. Arne Duncan, education czar, promises privatized charter schools and merit pay---more of the same, faster.

The last 40 years demonstrate the primary role of capitalist democracy, which Obama personifies: An executive committee of the rich where they iron out differences, then allow us to choose which of them will oppress us best--and their armed weapon. Currently, the main result of Obama's demagoguery is to resurrect forms of nationalism that were becoming exposed by the Bush regimes' harsh tactics. Now we get the velvet glove over the iron fist, Obamagogue.

Only the Rouge Forum, which includes many voices, has had room for this kind of analysis in the US. We've combined this reasoned critique with action: test boycotts, strikes, and backing for resisters. Our publications circulate world-wide. In addition, we created a community of thinking people who can join together in friendly debate, overcoming isolation.

Hope and change rest not in seeking some politician to save us, but through building a mass class conscious base of people willing to fight back, to sacrifice to rearrange the social relations that allow the few to rule the many through ruses like nationalism, racism, sexism, and religious irrationality. Absent that goal, all struggle is mere tactics, lurching from opposing one unrelated form of oppression to the next, never getting to the root of things.

The union executives are no help. Already they prepare to offer concessions (concessions don't save jobs, they only make employers want more), and to attack other sectors of workers not paying them dues (the California Teachers Association supports a regressive sales tax hike to pay for schooling) and to consolidate their power (NEA President Dennis Van Roekel seeks, again, to merge NEA with the AFL-CIO, SEIU's Andy Stern moving to take control of the AFL and Change to Win, etc). The very structures of unions divide people by job, race, industry. NEA and AFT spent millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours to elect Obama who demonstrated open contempt for educators throughout his campaign. With school workers the most unionized people in the US, the unions are unprepared to resist the attacks on every facet of education ahead.

That's why it's important to come to the Rouge Forum Conference and offer your own leadership to a movement for Equality and Freedom in schools and out. The them of the conference, Education, Empire, Economy and Ethics at the Crossroads, offers a wide field for discussion and presentations.

You can add your own voice, right now, to the Rouge Forum blog established by Community Coordinator Adam Renner athttp://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/

The Rouge Forum News deadline is February 15. Send articles, cartoons, art, etc., to Adam Renner (arenner@bellarmine.edu )

Thanks to Katy and Greg, Kerry, Mary, Paul, Gina and Adam, Amber, Wayne, Tommie, Donavan, Sally, Lisa, Sharon A. David, Marty, Gil G, Perry, Marc, Kevin, Shelly, Chris, Candace, Lacy, Anne, Donna, Alan S, Sherry, Tally A, Kim, Sue, Laura C, Lynn S, Stephanie, Colleen, Kelly, and Sarah.

All the best in the New Year,

Down the banks and
Up the Rebels!

r

Israel/Hamas/US/Gaza

2009-01-18T10:31:00.006-05:00

The RF wanted to open up a conversation regarding the most recent eruption of violence in the Gaza strip, which has claimed several hundred lives.

Below are several selected links discussing the conflict. Please feel free to add further links--particularly those which will expand the conversation--and/or your comment:

http://www.alternet.org/story/116855 (America's hidden role in Hamas's rise to power)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/avnery (A memo to Obama on Israel)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/opinion/08khalidi.html (What you don't know about Gaza)
http://www.truthout.org/011709X (Israel declares unilateral cease fire in Gaza)
http://www.truthout.org/011509S (Cease fire, cease siege)
http://www.truthout.org/011309R (Eyeless in Gaza, hell-bent for Iran)
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/gaza09.html (Statement from Historians Against the War Steering Committee0
http://mail.bellarmine.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc9DN2Oi0-w%26feature=related (Israelis protesting the war in Gaza)
http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1770&more=1&c=1 (James Petras)

Though a cease fire was declared Saturday, January 17, the conflict is yet ongoing and one still worth discussing, since it is emblatic of and connected to worldwide violence, hegemony, and dehumanization. Most of us writing here, especially me, witness the travesty and the human cost from the comfort of our chairs and couches in front of our computers and TVs. We imbibe images of dehumanization and moral/ethical depletion and feel disgust, (odd) disconnection, and/or helplessness. Though the events should stimulate (re)action, response, and resistance, many are rendered silent, hopeless. We may determine this to be rational given the culture of fear, ignorance, mysticism, obedience, disconnection, and personal profit inculcated through capital's schools, churches, media, and segregated neighborhoods. However, it is not just--and these rationales must be exposed such that choices are made more clear and our necessary actions are clarified.

Personally, I side neither with Israel nor Hamas. Instead, I side with Palestinians attempting to carve out a dignified life and Israelis who advocate sanity from their government. While the fundamentalist sects within both Judaism and Islam use different words, their ideologies are symmetrical inasmuch as they seek the devestataion of 'the other'. Both are antidemocratic. Both are dehumanizing. The articulation of religion and nationalism is oppressive to the core and breeds irrationalism.

People of conscience must continue to educate, to help our students, friends, colleagues, etc. mine the gray between both poles of irrationalism, to find other axes/dimensions that foster dialogue, deepened consciousness, and enriched democracy. We must be prepared to resist while simultaneously waiting for and creating the turning points toward something more communal, more humanizing. The struggle in Gaza is connected to the struggle in our schools, the labor struggle, the (endless) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ongoing racism and the backlash against immigrants, the fight for justice everywhere. Our opportunity is to make these connections, to cut through the ideologies intended to seperate us, to keep us afraid, and to keep us docile. Our solidarity can be carried out in our classrooms, our community organizations, our families, our unions, etc. Our solidarity can be cemented one act, one voice at a time. Our solidarity can be won through a radical struggle with ourselves which will move us toward the center of resistance wherever it is needed.

I look forward to your comments, links, and feedback.

Excellent interview with the late Utah Phillips on Democracy Now!

2009-01-05T12:31:00.002-05:00

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2009/1/1

Rouge Forum Update--12/26--from Rich

2009-01-02T11:11:00.002-05:00

Happy Happy and Merry Merry!

There are hopeful signs for the year ahead.

Greece (thanks to our friend VK): http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/2008_greek_riots.html (Similar actions took place in France at the same time. In Greece, workers seized their union offices, arguing the offices belong to the workers, not the union bosses).
The New School: http://www.newschoolinexile.com/
Chicago: http://www.rabble.ca/rabbletv/program-guide/best-net/workers-republic-scenes-successful-factory-occupation
The Rouge Forum Conference in May: http://www.rougeforumconference.org/ (send your proposals to Joe Bishop at joe.bishop@emich.edu)
The Rouge Forum Blogspot: http://therougeforum.blogspot.com/. Join the conversation.
The Rouge Forum News (send your articles, poems, art, cartoons, and good ideas to Adam Renner at arenner@bellarmine.edu)
The New Improved Shoe Game for snow-ins: http://www.aksalser.com/game.htm

For those with longer memories, three more of the Grenada 17, jailed in a 17th century prison since 1983 for crimes they did not commit, were released last week, leaving seven in jail today: http://www.counterpunch.org/gibson06052004.html

Thanks to Wayne, Amber, Adam, VK, Beau, Erin, Gil G, Patrick, Susan O and H, Joe L, Steve, Curry, Perry, Sandy, David H--both--Sally, Sharon A., Mary and Paul, Tally A, Dana, Katie and Greg, Karen K, David S, Bill, MrJ, George S, Donavan, Tommie and Bob, Glenn R, Michael, Kevin, Tony, Marc, Sherry, Mandy, Kim, Matthew, Zoe, Linda, Jim and Gordon, Llona, Lisa, Bertell, Joe B, and C., VP, Nancy, Mike A, Kino, Stephanie, Bonnie, Ann D-H, Chris, Candace, Norma, and to all those who helped build a class conscious social movement for freedom and equality.

We are saddened to note the death of a friend, Joe Kincheloe (1950-2008).

Down the banks
and Up the Rebels!

All the best, r

Fight Back Against Obamagogue's Latest Lie: War

2008-12-06T15:24:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

Thanks to Adam for setting this up.

I hope the blog helps us spur discussion, especially within the SC. And it may make the RF Updates better too. I am planning to send a version of this out to the email list Sunday night. Anyone have anything they think should be added or deleted?

Below the RF update proposal is a letter to the NYTimes, which they probably will not print.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/us/politics/04military.html?emc=eta1
The US is not going to leave Iraq or any other oil region and the US ruling classes are fully prepared to try to make war forever over their collapsing empire, Note that war costs are not even being factored into the massive debt crisis the US now builds,

while liberals call for a full blown corporate state
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/saving-the-big-3-for-you_b_147970.html

And the UAW leadership begs to make more concessions
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/business/04auto.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
demonstrating that the union executives are a voice of employers in the workers's midst
http://clogic.eserver.org/2006/gibson.html

when the main lesson from thirty years of labor history is that concessions do not save jobs, rather like giving blood to sharks, bosses only want more,

Next in line are teachers and here we have a bellwether NEA local offering concessions right off the bat
http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/news.jsp?key=324055&rc=me

What we are witnessing is the rapid emergence of fascism as a worldwide popular force: class warfare everywhere hastened by imperialist war: http://www.richgibson.com/teachinOct2008.htm

It is possible to fight back but only if that resistance takes up the question of the system of capital itself as well as the impact of this crisis in schools where curricula regimentation, high stakes testing, and miltarization will intensify under Obama as that is what this social system requires---unless school workers, parents and kids develop the solidarity and good sense to fight; not starve.

All the best,

r
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/opinion/06ayers.html

Bill Ayers claims he was just another part of the anti-war movement and never killed anyone. Phooey. I am a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student movement in US history and a radical yet today. The terrorist Weatherman sect destroyed SDS when, in 1969, they sought to replace a movement of people organizing for equality and peace with Ayers’ authoritarian mis-leadership and bombs. Before the biggest outpouring of student activism in the last century, the Weathermen demolished the SDS mailing list, leaving the movement with no center. They killed themselves and SDS. Weatherman was the “action-faction,”celebrating irrationalism, drugs, and exploitative sex, pandering to the peasant nationalism of the day. They opposed the radical, “going to the root,” of social problems. They held most people in the world in contempt. Then, Ayers was a liberal with explosives and hubris. Today, Ayer is a foundation-funded liberal: see Mayor Richard Dailey’s endorsement. There is no "new" Bill Ayers, as he claims. He opposed a mass based class conscious movement for equality and freedom then, and opposes it now. Those of us who fought the Weathermen in SDS, and who did not abandon the grassroots struggle for worldwide justice, know him for what he is. That Ayers clearly backed the liberal Obama, who promises wider wars, and bailouts to the rich, is no surprise.

Dr Rich Gibson
Emeritus Professor
San Diego State University

Eyes wide open; spirit fully engaged; hands ready for the work: On turning points and new (unwritten) chapters?

2008-11-30T11:47:00.002-05:00

I couldn’t resist an opportunity to check in and challenge us as the first decade of the new millennium winds down; as the shocks that characterize it amplify: militarism, standardization, genocide, economic disenfranchisement, et al; as a president of color (finally) takes office; and as neoliberalism begins to flame out, helping many more see its impossibility as economic policy and offering the US (and the world) a choice of one of two directions: fascism and authoritarianism or humanism and democracy.

In many ways this essay, this riff, this stream concludes a series of essays I’ve posted since our last trip to the Global South. In these essays, I imperfectly raised issues of economics, social difference, education, and religion. (Click on any of the links to peruse these essays; education probably the more important of any of the four.) More recently, I offered an essay on violence, which I am revising and will post soon at pucknation dot com. Whether or not you have been privy to these earlier essays, I offer this final one as a way forward—possible turning points and new (unwritten) chapters—for your consideration and critique.

Keep writing in the dark: / a record of the night, or / words that pulled you from depths of unknowing / words that flew through your mind, strange birds / crying their urgency with human voices (Denise Levertov, Writing in the Dark)[1]
Since I realized a more critical consciousness was possible and necessary (when I began graduate school in 1996), I have consistently attempted to reconcile this consciousness and understanding of theory with more critical and constructive practice. Often, this has happened pedagogically, using the classroom as a sort of laboratory. But, it has also unfolded more concretely in my engagement with the world outside (the often times insular) school walls. At my (imperfect) best, I have sought to share this evolutionary reconciliation, openly—always coming to more critical consciousness and constructive practice based on your critique, questions, and nuance. I learned this praxis from many of you to whom I write. And, it has been energizing to see others engage this evolutionary praxis as a result of my teaching and learning with them/you. So, it is with this spirit that I offer what follows. Five, ten, twenty years from now we will return to these reflections and note how far we have no doubt traveled beyond these elementary considerations. Nonetheless, I present them as a marker to be imbibed, transgressed, and developed.

As we move ahead, I want to urge you to consider joining the work of the Rouge Forum. I want to encourage connecting to a broader national coalition with international possibilities and implications. This larger, connected body has an even better shot at confronting standardization, militarization, and the coming recession/depression with reason and passion.

Recently, I have accepted a post within the RF as the virtual community organizer, attempting to connect the various constituents within the Rouge Forum toward resistance of the above, as well as helping others launch a number of new and continuing projects, including: an edited text on more humanizing curricula, our annual conference (this year in Ypsilanti at EMU: see http://www.therougeforumconference.org/ for more details, and the following essay from Rich Gibson for some more background: http://richgibson.com/eeeecrossroads.html), a print edition of the RF News, etc. Simultaneous to this work, there are also some interesting stirrings emerging from the southwest relative to the formation of an institute for social justice, which may provide an apt space for education, training, and action. Finally, our work in the Global South continues to evolve with more critical possibilities, providing one of many potential international satellites for this work. More to come, for sure. In any event, my encouragement is to seek out this broader community, this wider theoretical agenda, and this growing movement for resistance and transformation.

Seeing usually / was a matter of what was / in front of my eyes / matching what was / behind my brain (Audre Lorde, Contact Lenses)
In the previous dispatches noted above I made several conclusions, pulling from recently read work and drawing upon ongoing discussions. I suggested paths that induce agency and/or demythologize reality, recognizing that roads which go through organized religion are often counter-revolutionary. I noted, simply, the need to collectively organize and become conscious, wrestling with our socialization/indoctrination/domestication, choosing to become political agents of hope, and recognizing education as a tool for domination by the rich). I pulled from Paul Farmer’s concept of “pragmatic solidarity,” highlighting that our words of concern must be matched by on-the-ground work that represents a “being with” not just a “talking about.” I also tried to wrap my head around Gustavo Gutierrez’s notion of a “permanent cultural revolution” in which our process motivates us to struggle against all the forces that oppress humankind. As well, related to process, I consistently attempted to recycle Rebecca Solnit’s ideas regarding “moments of creation” and “the politics of prefiguration.” Finally, I have tried to keep Milton’s concepts of “voice and visibility” in front of us, helping to re-imagine the struggle and to re-define what the terms of victory might, instead, look like.

Now my eyes have become / a part of me exposed / quick risky and open / to all the same dangers (Audre Lorde, Contact Lenses)
These considerations, of course, remain at play. We can use and reuse them in a recursive and reflective turn to make sense of our work. And, they can help launch us into renewed action. I consider, also, a few more concepts which may illuminate a way forward. Michael Lebowitz, very much considering a socialism for the 21st century, talks of the “revolution of radical needs”—that is, the interplay of self-change and systemic change. As well, he proffers a “democracy as protagonism,” which is a democracy of people who are transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects. In this way, then, we must conceive of history differently—not only as a “totality” (something our education fails to give us), but as something constantly to be written and re-written, lived not in the past but in the present as we imagine a future. In this history-in-the-making, then, we constantly make and re-make ourselves as subjects impacting this record rather than as objects dictated to by someone else’s narrative.

A few concrete projects may help cement the point:

For those of us who have been and are involved with the work in the Global South, this work has been an evolutionary process ( which Gina and I highlight here: http://www.richgibson.com/rouge_forum/2008/decadework.htm). Most of its history, certainly, is yet to be written. As we seek to launch a second decade of work there, many of us feel as though we have just gotten started and finally have a firmly articulated foundation which will help us implement new critical literacy initiatives with our ongoing partners as well as (hopeful) new partners. This process of reading the word and our worlds more critically will lead to a deeper consciousness, hopefully, on both sides. However, beyond the potentially reciprocal nature of this process, our desire is that the process actually become a generative one in which unimagined possibilities will emerge, conjointly and solidaristically, and from which an entirely new history—a new chapter—may take root. As well, we continue to envisage a more critical medical partnership, launched from a premise that health care is a human right. And, we continue to attempt contact with progressive movements within Jamaica, such as the International School of Bottom-Up Organizing, in order to partner and be led by grassroots groups within Jamaica.

More local to Louisville, work with the Volunteers of America Family Shelter continues into a seventh year. This winter season we’ll share in a fifth annual holiday celebration and next semester, with some new and former students, we’ll launch yet another partnership with the shelter. As I’ve written in the past, Louisville has a mostly unreported problem with poverty (a ranking of 3rd in the nation in concentrated poverty as well as a population of 7500 children who qualify as homeless, 8% of the total student population, attending its public schools). This issue of poverty and homelessness will only worsen given the economic downturn. While several of us have continued to raise awareness related to homelessness locally, nationally, and internationally through shantytown actions and ongoing service to this and other shelters, we still have miles to go—shifting from social service to social change. But, like the history of our work in the Global South, this partnership with VOA is a history-in-the-making—never quite certain when we may reach a turning point. So, we struggle on, making more critical sense of poverty and its root cause (capitalism), connecting our lives to those impacted by the inevitability of this system, and working together.

Even more local to many of our lives, several of us are taking this work to our classrooms in both university and K-12 environments. Even amidst rabid standardization, school to military/prison pipelines, and growing irrationalism (mysticism like Creationism taught in science classes), there are teachers doing the front line work of helping produce more revolutionary subjects. This work, as we know, is difficult because we as teachers must constantly re-educate ourselves based upon the mis-education we received for most of our lives. As well, we are consistently attempting to dislodge our consciousness from the slick socialization of a capitalist culture that attempts to turn us into unthinking consumers of our societal trappings. Though they attempt to keep us separate from each other, we must continually strive to ‘get together’: developing our own professional learning communities, making our unions work for us instead of for those who intend to oppress us, and taking action where prudent and necessary. We must continue to grow this mass base of front line workers who Rich characterizes as existing at the choke point of capital’s system. We have power. We need to harness it and be strategic in its use. This will lead to a turning point.

Aside from these particular projects or progressive pedagogical potentials, I know that each of us are also involved in several other projects and actions: from study groups to site-based decision-making bodies to community organizations. Where possible we need to link our actions. Resistive movements must be linked in order to mount the necessary action to overturn the status quo. We must make the time to seek out the intersections and, more importantly, engage these more conscious constituencies toward ameliorative action.

I think one rubric, under which we could connect this action is through the Rouge Forum, as it attempts to connect classrooms across the country in a more global attempt to resist standardization, militarism, and irrationalism. While there are a multiplicity of ways to formulate a calculus of resistance and hope, the Rouge Forum as only one such formulation, it seems as though we must get strategic, savvy, and together, as quickly as possible. While the symbolic hope of an Obama presidency has brought a certain suasion to some, we must know that our work today is the same as it was yesterday. What is most hopeful about Obama’s election is that folks demonstrated that they could still get together. The task for getting together for an electoral victory may be easier than getting together for systemic change, but folks got together, nonetheless. We know that improvements will be slight, if at all, since the rich still run the country/world. So, we must keep an objective reality clearly in focus. And, we must get about the business of mounting a commensurate resistance to the oppositional force that seeks to dominate truth and liberty, demolish hope, and dehumanize.

The killings continue, each second / pain and misfortune extend themselves/ in the genetic chain, injustice is done knowingly, and the air / bears the dust of decayed hopes (Denise Levertov, City Psalm)
We have choices to make. What Rich, Milton et al help to continue to remind us is that these choices are moral and ethical ones. These choices can point us toward what is right, humanizing, and just. And, we must think of it as a choice. This is a decision. To not make a choice for what is right, or to delay, or to remain silent, is to cast a vote for further oppression, marginalization, and disenfranchisement. To not consider it a choice, given our exposure, is to denigrate the legacy of resistors who have historically struggled for what was right, to find the right side of history. With a modicum of exposure to issues of injustice, everyone has always had a choice. Many, of course, have chosen the wrong side of history. Usually, it is the privileged that make this particular choice. And, we are also the ones who often sit, indignantly, with our perfect hindsight, castigating our less than enlightened forebears who chose slavery, who chose Jim Crow, who chose child labor, who chose the witch hunts, who chose to maintain a massive underclass to support our lifestyles. Aren’t these the same choices we have before us today? How will our posterity judge us? More importantly, how do those currently tread upon by the system judge us—the present-day privileged with our luxury of ‘choice’?

As I’ve noted quite ineloquently in the past, we need a massive systemic enema. I believe we are either working toward that or against that. Working toward that takes on many (imperfect) forms, but it must (inarguably) involve solidarity with other brothers and sisters who choose to struggle; it must (unquestionably) involve our self-change as we work toward and are informed by systemic change; and it must (at the very least) involve our voice—however shaky or initially soft—challenging the system. The oppositional force we face is strong. The only way to turn it is to mount a commensurate resistance that will eventually overcome this force. History tells us this is possible. This is, actually, the history to which we can contribute. But, we will have to choose to become producers of meaning rather than consumers of someone else’s propaganda. We will have to choose to become organic intellectuals rather than technicians for the empire. We will have to choose to become democratic and humanizing mechanisms for revolution and liberation rather than unconscious tools for the rich. I realize I am largely preaching to the choir, here. So, I look forward to the way we might make these choices together.

It is better to speak / knowing / we were never meant to survive (Audre Lorde, Litany for survival)

Or

The choice to speak / or not to speak. / We spoke. (Denise Levertov, Protestors)
The recipe for what we do is simple, involving three interactive and interdependent parts—something Milton and I have been messing with going on three years now. It necessarily involves both practical and reflective work. And, it involves commitment to its exercise and evolution. It is also not perfect, nor divine or dogmatic. Therefore, it involves the need for your reaction and voice. Only together can we get it right.

We must work together: community. This necessitates a movement toward each other, a tendency to privilege the collective over the individual, and an attitude of affirmation and critical constructiveness. Whenever possible, we have to think about how we can accomplish our tasks together—how could the PrESS Network help with this? What kind of resources might the Rouge Forum have? What other organization is also working on this issue?. We must consider who we trust and what side we want to take. We must see that our liberation and humanization is bound up and only possible in the liberation and humanization of others. We all know the ways we can better get together. We all know the commitment this will take. We know the in-the-moment decisions this will take as well as the long-term planning this will incorporate. There is no mystery to this work. It really just requires us to do it: to get together, to avoid our self-isolating tendencies brought about by narratives of competition or a socialization toward selfishness, and to be in solidarity against what is irrational, apathetic, and oppressive. In this way we renew our commitment to democracy; we focus on process and the evolution of relationships; and we believe we cannot be free until others are free.

Along with coming together, we must continue to wrestle with consciousness. We must continue to learn and relearn history, particularly alternative histories. If we don’t know where we’ve been, we can’t possibly know where we are or where to go. We must come to a clearer understanding of reality, particularly material reality which illuminates for us the very real disenfranchisement of billions of people. Recently, Gina, Sonya, Milton and I produced an essay we sent to Intercultural Education about the possibility of realizing a more reciprocal global education—particularly through our work in Jamaica. In this essay, which is contextualized against a backdrop of accelerating dehumanizing trends in our culture, Milton wove an intricate history which elucidates the formation and intimate interactions of patriarchy, racism, and Capitalism. Prior to our collaboration, I had been ignorant to much of the history he pulled from, offering a new moment of creation for me and providing a more critical conceptualization of the way I go about my own work. As the media-ting and socializing forces urge us to act in dehumanizing ways: getting dumber in front of TVs that conjure ‘reality’; purchasing products with plastic for which payment is a future, more costly, proposition; consuming commodities that we know were sown by or picked by the world’s poorest; we ultimately do so at our own peril. And, as we allow education to be dictated by the dogmatic divinations of the ruling elite, we sacrifice another generation of children to its grand delusion and doublespeak of ‘great equalizer’. Though we must be critical and strategic with the revelation and dialogical evolution of a different reality, we wait with great cost. So, we must get together, challenge our consciousness, and figure out the next move.

Finally, we will need to speak and act with courage. To move against the grain will require immense boldness and perhaps a little bit of counter-intuition (depending on the grip of our individual socialization). Audre Lorde and Denise Levertov capture it well above, I think. In the prior lines to Lorde’s conclusion, she enlists all the reasons we are typically afraid, even when silent. So, she suggests, why not speak? And, Levertov, helping provide a theme throughout this essay proposes that it comes down to choice. We can remain silent. Or, we can use our voice and speak. And, these voices must become a chorus. They should not be whimsical solo acts (though we may find, at times and in certain circumstances, that we are the lone voice). That voice should harmoniously resound alongside the historical echoes of others singing the same melody. The ready words are formed through conscious struggle and tireless practice in our shared communities. Those who speak are informed by movements which are driven by diligent study and liberating praxis. So, we get together to challenge each other toward a deeper consciousness. This challenge, then, offers the possibility of developing more critical, collaborative, and nuanced scripts—always ready to be shared and spoken, deconstructed and developed further, if necessary.

I recognize these are fairly elementary considerations and I’ve not said much that is new. I also recognize that I struggle with these reflections. That I find myself firmly implanted in a middle-class lifestyle and have become a poster-child of Paul Kivel’s “buffer zone” agents, signals that I have a long way to go toward consciousness and liberation. That I notice the hypocritical tendencies for which my practice does not match the theory I want to espouse, highlights the possibility that I may be closer to a turning point. That I more often make decisions which recognize that I have choice and agency in the matter, offers hope. That I seek out others with whom to share the work and figure out the process, presages a new chapter for the struggle—the chapter that we write as a community.

Eyes wide open; spirit fully engaged; hands ready for the work.

[1] Thanks, Gina, for bringing us this poetry and constantly providing us the metaphors to make more critical sense of our reality!