Category Archives: politics

activism, free culture, musings, nrrrd, ows, politics, video

Edward Snowden’s Opening Statement


“NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I don’t want to live in a society …”

“You could not have done better if you had gone to central casting and had a professional scriptwriter. He’s on the nerdy side of attractive, sensible-sounding and relaxed, articulate, and able to deliver key points in a compact, mass market friendly manner.” — Yves Smith

I was surprised that the existence/extent of our surveillance state was a surprise. Didn’t everybody know that? But the way the Guardian/Greenwald have played this so far is wonderful. The prosecution of whistleblowers is in many ways a much greater threat to our freedom than the spying. It seems completely inescapable that private data will be collected by both corporations and governments so long as the server space & energy exists to do so cheaply. But it’s what’s done with the data that’s scary, especially the lack of consequences for abusers of data. Whistleblowers are a crucial line of defense against abuse. This is true not just of surveillance but also financial & environmental regulation, for example. Consistently we’ve been prosecuting the whistleblowers instead of the criminals, accelerating the cycle of corruption and decay in government and society.

For Edward Snowden to publicly reveal himself at the height of media attention on the story, is a masterful shift of the story away from “privacy” and towards “importance & vulnerability of the little guy who speaks out against the system.” Whereas police brutality was arguably a distraction from Occupy’s message of income inequality, I hope whistleblower prosecution usurps the surveillance debate. Which isn’t to say that surveillance isn’t a huge issue. It deserves the spotlight, or even better, full sun. But we can’t make any traction on that issue, or financial crimes, or unsafe power plants, etc., if we keep ignoring & imprisoning whistleblowers.

In this video Snowden is a perfectly-cast hero for the whistleblower plight. If a more confident America in 1964 got Mario Savio speaking truth to power, then for 2013, with our “rockstars” being Facebook developers (or some such nonsense), Snowden is perfect: white, male, nerdy, calm, non-threatening, attractive enough to look good on camera, “self-made” high school drop out who went on to a lucrative upper-middle class career thanks to his skills. Basically, how the archetypal Redditor imagines himself to be.

So we finally have a narrative to make rally around whistleblower protection. Exquisitely played PR, Mr. Greenwald. What Cindy Sheehan was to the anti-war movement, perhaps Edward Snowden will be to whistleblowers. Of course, that means the counter-PR will ferocious. So far Snowden appears to have more foresight than Manning and more humility than (and hopefully none of the rapiness of) Assange. So it remains to be seen how they’ll go about destroying him in the court of public opinion. I am relieved that he seems to have gone into this with his eyes open, fully aware of what he is sacrificing. He deserves our gratitude and admiration. The battle ahead will be nasty indeed.

activism, design, economic doom, event, made by me, ows, politics

May Day: Demand JOBS FOR ALL

Jobs For All - May Day
Download .pdf

Join the Rally and March on May Day for JOBS FOR ALL!

Join a large, visible presence advocating job creation and an end to unemployment:

JOBS FOR ALL
Dignified work at good union wages for everyone who wants a job.

TRABAJOS PARA TODOS
Trabajo digno con sueldos buenos de escala sindical para cualquiera que quiera un trabajo.

TUESDAY MAY 1
Mayday 2012 Rally & March
Union Square, NYC
4:00PM
Join us at the corner of Union Sq. West & 14th St.
(By the dry fountain)

We demand a democratically-controlled public works and public service program, with direct government employment, to create 25 million new jobs at good union wages. The new jobs will be to build the facilities and provide the services needed to meet the needs of the 99%, including in education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and clean energy. The program will be funded by raising taxes on the banks, corporations and the wealthiest 1%, and by ending all U.S. wars. Employment in the program will be open to all, including immigrants and persons formerly incarcerated.

Demandamos obras públicas y un programa de servicios públicos democráticamente controlados, con empleo directo del gobierno, para crear 25 millones de nuevos empleos con sueldos buenos de escala sindical. Los nuevos empleos serán para construir las instalaciones y proveer los servicios necesitados para satisfacer las necesidades del 99%, incluyendo en educación, cuidados de la salud, vivienda, transporte y energía limpia. El programa será financiado aumentando los impuestos a los bancos, las corporaciones y el 1% de los más ricos, y poniendo fin a todas las guerras por los Estados Unidos de América. Empleo en el programa estará disponible para todos, incluyendo a los inmigrantes y a las personas anteriormente encarceladas.

www.jobsforallny.org
Facebook Event

NY JOBS FOR ALL COMMITTEE • www.JobsForAllNY.org • twitter: @JobsForAllNY

For more information, or to endorse the demand, email: info@jobsforallny.org
Para mas información, o para apoyar la demanda, email: info@jobsforallny.org

activism, event, mso, politics

VOTE! Tuesday, April 17: Maplewood-SO Board of Education Election

To my friends and neighbors in Maplewood-South Orange,

I am writing to urge you to vote in Tuesday’s election for Board of Education. There is a lot at stake for our district and it looks to be a very tight race. Polls are open from 2-9pm on Tuesday, April 17.

I support Amy Higer, Jennifer Payne-Parrish, and Tia (Karen) Swanson. The key issue for me is the district’s plan to raise expectations and provide a high-quality education to ALL students by delevelling the middle school and substantially restructuring the high school’s placement system. Combined with curricular reform that is already underway, I think these changes will have a positive, much-needed impact on our district.

Higer, Payne-Parrish and Swanson support these reforms and Payne-Parrish, an incumbent, voted for them. The other slate (Pai-Eastman-Bennet) opposes these changes and Eastman, the incumbent on that slate, voted against them. Instead, they support a “choice-based” system which, though rhetorically appealing, is clearly not a realistic option for our district of limited resources. We need unity and a firm commitment to all students –– not more division.

Another important factor which I don’t think has received much discussion is that Madhu Pai works as a “marketing executive for an educational consulting firm” (according to her campaign website). According to LinkedIn, Pai works for Education Dynamics, a company which colleges and universities hire to market their schools to prospective students. Their services allow expensive, for-profit colleges and online-diploma programs to pay to have their programs promoted on seemingly informative websites. While I do not doubt that Pai is committed to our district, I cannot help but see her employment in the for-profit education industry as a conflict of interest. Already, Mark Gleason, a current school board member, is the Executive Director of the Philadelphia School Partnership –- an organization which raises funds from billionaire philanthropists to advocate charter schools and other “choice” style programs. I believe we must be vigilant in keeping our school board independent from an industry that is steadily and stealthily working to undermine our public education system.

On a more positive note, I recently visited my high school history teacher. The AP US History program at the school has nearly doubled in size since when I was a student. What began as a class of 15 now includes over 90 students — nearly 20% of the grade. Test scores have not fallen; nearly all students still receive 4s or 5s on the exam. As my teacher explained, “many of these students never thought of themselves as AP students — until they found themselves an AP class. Then they quickly rose to the challenge.” Expectations matter. We have a great district filled with incredible, dedicated teachers and competent, driven administrators. Already significant improvements have been made, but there is still much to be done. Let’s vote for the board members who will support our district in doing best by ALL students.

Sincerely,
Rebecca

PS. You can learn more about all the candidates on their websites:
http://payne-parrishandswanson.org
http://www.amyhiger.org
http://www.votesoma2012.com

Also, when considering Pai-Eastman-Bennet’s promise to “make our decisions based on data and evidence about what works and what does not”, I suggest keeping the findings of this essay in mind:
http://monthlyreview.org/2010/12/01/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-test-scorer

activism, culture, economic doom, event, made by me, ows, politics, video

“The Struggle for Full Employment: Not a New Idea and Not a New Struggle”

Last weekend I attended Left Forum and videoed a fantastic panel, The Struggle for Full Employment: Not a New Idea and Not a New Struggle, sponsored by the National Jobs for All Coalition.

“The Struggle for Full Employment: Not a New Idea and Not a New Struggle”
Left Forum 2012
Saturday, March 17, 5:00-6:40 PM, Room W401

www.njfac.org
www.jobscampaign.org

The presentation explores New Deal job creation efforts and FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights that began with the right to a decent job. It discusses two major attempts to secure full employment, in the immediate post-World War II period and in the 1970s, the first ending in the defeat of full employment legislation and the second, in the failure to implement a watered-down full employment act. Full employment, the presentation shows, will take a fundamental break with neo-liberalism and a reorientation of power from big business and Wall Street to middle- and working-class people and will require the full-scale social movement that both earlier struggles lacked.

Panelists:

Chuck Bell: Vice Chair, National Jobs for All Coalition, co-author of “Shared Prosperity: The Drive For Decent Work” (2006). Twenty years of experience in consumer and health care advocacy, and community movements for jobs and economic justice.

Helen Ginsburg: Professor Emerita of Economics, Brooklyn College, CUNY., and co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition. Author of books and articles on employment policy and strategies.

Gertrude S. Goldberg: The New Deal and Social Welfare Professor of Social Policy Emerita, Adelphi University School of Social Work where she directed the Ph.D. program. Chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition. Co-chair of the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare & Equity. Author/co-author and editor of six books and numerous book chapters and articles on social policy and employment.

Moderator: Sheila D. Collins, Professor of Political Science at William Paterson University and co-founder of the National Jobs for All Coalition.

Video by Rebecca Rojer, http://rrrojer.net

activism, economic doom, event, hope, ows, politics

Rocky Anderson Super Tuesday Money Bomb

I just donated $50 to Rocky Anderson’s presidential campaign. I’ve already come public about my support of Rocky and unwillingness to keep voting for Dems but I just wanted to share this email from the Rocky campaign, because it’s so damn refreshing to hear something like this from a politician:

Rebecca —

Thank you for your donation to our campaign. With your help, we will lead the United States forward on a healthy, just, and sustainable path.

We do not accept more than a total of $100 from any person. We are making the choice to emphasize the need to end the corrupting influence of money over our political system. We will rely on grassroots organizing and democratized means of communication to overthrow the dictatorship of selfish narrow interests, which, with the collusion of the two dominant parties, have been undermining the public interest.

This campaign stands for:

An immediate end to the on-going wars;

Essential health care coverage for all citizens;

Urgent international leadership by the U.S. to prevent the most catastrophic consequences of climate disruption;

Adequate revenues to balance the budget through fair taxation;

Treatment of substance abuse as a public health, rather than criminal justice, issue;

Control of the Federal Reserve by the Treasury Department and Congress;

A balanced budget (or a surplus) except in times of war or major recession;

An end to the legal concept of corporate “personhood;” a constitutional amendment to overrule Citizens United ;

An end to the corrupting impact of money in our electoral system;

Protection of U.S. jobs, through re-negotiation of trade agreements and jobs programs like WPA and CCC to improve our nation’s infrastructure and employ millions of Americans;

An end to the stranglehold on our government by the military-industrial complex.

United we can come together to put the public’s interest first.

With gratitude,

Rocky Anderson

Tell TINA to shove it & donate today!

activism, friends, hope, jerz, politics, writing

Live Tweets from Maplewood-South Orange BOE Meeting on De-Leveling

[For context, check out my last blog post on the issue; also Cris Thorne‘s excellent documentary-in-progress De-Leveling the System]

9:22 PM: Live tweet msosd BOE meeting: heart warming speeches in favor of educational equity. Yay!
[edit: transcript of Board of Ed member Bill Gaudelli’s excellent speech here]

10:03 PM: BOE member Gleason uses USA’s low PISA scores to defend leveled instruction; Finland scores highest in world & is committed to edu equality
[see: “What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success” and “How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools“]

10:15 PM: Many community members speaking against proposal including real estate agent & board of trustees member. #movetomillburn

10:19 PM: Cool many community members in favor also speaking.

10:24 PM: Both sides of this agree can agree on one thing: 2 min is not enough for public comment.

10:32 PM: Gleason makes motion to break proposal into 3 pieces: IB middle school, middle school levelup, & chs level restructuring

10:33 PM: Vote 5-4 to separate the proposal.

10:34 PM: IB program passes unanimously

10:39 PM: Gleason trying to table proposal until there is a gifted and talented program; Daugherty disagrees, “don’t let perfect be enemy of good.”

10:40 PM: Middle school proposal passes 7:2!

10:41 PM: CHS proposal passes 8-1! #townpride

[As my friend Dan (who also stuck it out for the meeting) put it, now time for all the work!]

activism, culture, event, film, jerz, mso, musings, politics, video, writing

Remarks on Proposed Middle School De-leveling.

Context: The Maplewood-South Orange School District, which I attended my entire public school career, is in the process of de-leveling the middle school. The district belongs to a community with many wonderful and unique characteristics: suburban, easy public access to NYC, artistically vibrant, and both racially and economically diverse. But the leveling system reveals an uglier side, as the school is blatantly segregated along racial (and socio-economic) lines.

You can read the district’s proposal here. A paper profiling three case studies of successful elimination of “curricular stratification” can be found here. Its focus is on how to de-level, but the endnotes contain an overview of the literature on why, with two decades of papers discussing the benefits of heterogeneous grouping. Our district is in communication with one of the district’s profiled, and seems to be following the steps outlined in the paper.

Finally, I was inspired to prepare these remarks after attending a discussion of alumni last week. It was a powerful post-mortem on our public school experiences. Hearing first-hand the vastly different experience some of my peers had in the very same schools has motivated me to get involved in this issue (again). The discussion was hosted by a filmmaker and fellow district alumnus Cris Thorne, who is working on a documentary called Deleveling the System. Excerpts of the discussion are online here and here. Additionally, I highly recommend Cris’s earlier documentary (produced as a high school student!), One School, for more background.

Finally, I should note that I was unable to read the complete transcript, because I had prepared for the standard 3 minutes of public comment and found out upon arrival that we were restricted to two minutes.

My name is Rebecca Rojer, CHS class of 2005.

As a k-12 alumnus of this district, it is clear to me that the leveling system is not colorblind. In both the classrooms and the hallways, white students are consistently given the benefit of the doubt, while black students are assumed to be trouble-makers and low achievers. Students enter school with different degrees of preparedness, but the leveling system calcifies these differences into inequalities.

Worse, the leveling system turns prejudice into self-fulfilling prophecy. Low expectations correlate to low performance. For example, women perform worse on math exams after being told there is a genetic difference in math ability between the sexes.

There is clearly a place for grouping students by skill-level and motivation. But it is not always beneficial, even for “top” students. This is especially true of the turbulent and vicious middle-school years, where academic success is better predicted by behavior and obedience than by aptitude.

There are many styles of learning – fast, slow, deep, shallow, literal, abstract, disciplined, intuitive – yet we conceive of “high” and “low” achievers through standardized tests that are valued precisely because they simplify everyone onto a single metric. When testing becomes the end game of education, we all suffer. Excessive reliance on testing dehumanizes students and ultimately sabotages their education. Students who feel valued and respected are more apt to learn. The infuriating paradox in our district is that top-level classes are discussion based, encouraging of critical thinking and debate, while lower-level classes too often focus exclusively on test prep.

Education is about empathy, respect, creativity, and citizenship as much as it is about literacy and arithmetic. These values reenforce each other. Knowledge is power, and schools should empower students. Let’s teach compound interest alongside the history of redlining and predatory lending. Education is about life, not the GEPA.

There is much to be gained by heterogenous classes. One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to a peer. And one of the best ways to be challenged, is to be confronted by someone who’s experiences and values are different from your own. That is what I most cherish from my education in this district. And for that, I really have to thank a group of my classmates, some of whom who are here tonight, for literally stopping classes my senior year to create a conversation among students in different levels.

Lets not forget, we’re all in this together. Today’s students are tomorrow’s voters, workers, mortgage-signers, taxpayers, parents, neighbors. Your children’s lives are affected not just by their own education, but by the education of everyone who participates in this society. To fret about the rigor of your special snowflake’s 6th grade social studies curriculum in light of massive, structural inequality is short-sighted and just plain wrong.

There is a wide-spread assumption that integrating classes will destroy our education system and wipe out our property values. Students can feel this very early on, and it is exactly this kind of attitude that perpetuates inequality. The best way to lift your property values is to do what’s right: work towards a system that benefits all students instead of only half. Lets reject the politics of fear, and instead move forward with empathy, creativity, and determination.