Thursday, June 30, 2016

Neoliberalism - Where Do Trump and Hillary Line Up? Plus Bernie: Dems Have to Wake Up

In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. .......   Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?...
the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.

Of course the word hasn’t gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism—i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self—has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.
I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market.
A superb piece on neoliberalism from Salon. Keep in mind in all my posts on neoliberalism - the UFT/NYSUT/AFT complex of leadership are neoliberals and that goes a ways to explain a lot. My last post on the NY Times piece on charters in Detroit is perfect neoliberalism in action. Bernie is presented as the ONLY option to NL - not Trump whom the press presents at the alternative which he is not. The best shot to change directions will come I believe in 2020.
Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.... It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists—comfortably established in the academy—likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans, but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the market capitalization of the self..... Salon, This is our neoliberal nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and why the market and the wealthy win every time
A reader suggested the Salon piece on neoliberalism and it points to the fears of using the "n" word.
Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on—one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s—better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim.
There's a lot of meat here so go to it below.

But first:
In yesterday's Times Bernie had an op-ed: Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up
Let’s be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change.
But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign’s rhetoric — and is central to Donald J. Trump’s message.
We need a president who will vigorously support international cooperation that brings the people of the world closer together, reduces hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war. We also need a president who respects the democratic rights of the people, and who will fight for an economy that protects the interests of working people, not just Wall Street, the drug companies and other powerful special interests.
We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.
We need to end the international scandal in which large corporations and the wealthy avoid paying trillions of dollars in taxes to their national governments.
We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels.
We need international efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness and ignorance.
The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States. Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.
In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.
======
Salon, This is our neoliberal nightmare: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and why the market and the wealthy win every time

http://www.salon.com/2016/06/06/this_is_our_neoliberal_nightmare_hillary_clinton_donald_trump_and_why_the_market_and_the_wealthy_win_every_time/

Over the last fifteen years, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.

People throw the term around loosely, as they do with “fascism,” with the same confounding results. Imagine living under fascism or communism, or earlier, classical liberalism, and not being allowed to acknowledge that particular frame of reference to understand economic and social issues. Imagine living under Stalin and never using the communist framework but focusing only on personality clashes between his lieutenants, or likewise for Hitler or Mussolini or Mao or Franco and their ideological systems! But this curious silence, this looking away from ideology, is exactly what has been happening for a quarter century, since neoliberalism, already under way since the early 1970s, got turbocharged by the Democratic party under the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Bill Clinton. We live under an ideology that has not been widely named or defined!

Absent the neoliberal framework, we simply cannot grasp what is good or bad for citizens under Cruz versus Trump, or Clinton versus Sanders, or Clinton versus Trump, away from the distraction of personalities. To what extent does each of them agree or disagree with neoliberalism? Are there important differences? How much is Sanders a deviation? Can we still rely on conventional distinctions like liberal versus conservative, or Democrat versus Republican, to understand what is going on? How do we grasp movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and now the Trump and Sanders insurgencies?
Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people’s self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the “new man.”

It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state.
I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism’s long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything—every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet—in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology. Neoliberalism happens to be the ideology—unlike the three major forerunners in the last 250 years—that has the fortune of coinciding with technological change on a scale that makes its complete penetration into every realm of being a possibility for the first time in human history.

From the early 1930s, when the Great Depression threatened the classical liberal consensus (the idea that markets were self-regulating, and the state should play no more than a night-watchman role), until the early 1970s, when global instability including currency chaos unraveled it, the democratic world lived under the Keynesian paradigm: markets were understood to be inherently unstable, and the interventionist hand of government, in the form of countercyclical policy, was necessary to make capitalism work, otherwise the economy had a tendency to get out of whack and crash.

It’s an interesting question if it was the stagflation of the 1970s, following the unhitching of the United States from the gold standard and the arrival of the oil embargo, that brought on the neoliberal revolution, with Milton Friedman discrediting fiscal policy and advocating a by-the-numbers monetarist policy, or if it was neoliberalism itself, in the form of Friedmanite ideas that the Nixon administration was already pursuing, that made stagflation and the end of Keynesianism inevitable.

It should be said that neoliberalism thrives on prompting crisis after crisis, and has proven more adept than previous ideologies at exploiting these crises to its benefit, which then makes the situation worse, so that each succeeding crisis only erodes the power of the working class and makes the wealthy wealthier. There is a certain self-fulfilling aura to neoliberalism, couched in the jargon of economic orthodoxy, that has remained immune from political criticism, because of the dogma that was perpetuated—by Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes—that There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Neoliberalism is excused for the crises it repeatedly brings on—one can think of a regular cycle of debt and speculation-fueled emergencies in the last forty years, such as the developing country debt overhang of the 1970s, the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s, and the subprime mortgage crisis of the 2000s—better than any ideology I know of. This is partly because its very existence as ruling ideology is not even noted by the population at large, which continues to derive some residual benefits from the welfare state inaugurated by Keynesianism but has been led to believe by neoliberal ideologues to think of their reliance on government as worthy of provoking guilt, shame, and melancholy, rather than something to which they have legitimate claim.
It is not surprising to find neoliberal multiculturalists—comfortably established in the academy—likewise demonizing, or othering, not Muslims, Mexicans, or African Americans, but working-class whites (the quintessential Trump proletariat) who have a difficult time accepting the fluidity of self-definition that goes well with neoliberalism, something that we might call the market capitalization of the self.
George W. Bush’s useful function was to introduce necessary crisis into a system that had grown too stable for its own good; he injected desirable panic, which served as fuel to the fire of the neoliberal revolution. Trump is an apostate—at least until now—in desiring chaos on terms that do not sound neoliberal, which is unacceptable; hence Jeb Bush’s characterization of him as the “candidate of chaos.” Neoliberalism loves chaos, that has been its modus operandi since the early 1970s, but only the kind of chaos it can direct and control.
To go back to origins, the Great Depression only ended conclusively with the onset of the second world war, after which Keynesianism had the upper hand for thirty-five years. But just as the global institutions of Keynesianism, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, were being founded at the New Hampshire resort of Bretton Woods in 1944, the founders of the neoliberal revolution, namely Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and others were forming the Mount Pelerin Society (MPS) at the eponymous Swiss resort in 1947, creating the ideology which eventually defeated Keynesianism and gained the upper hand during the 1970s.

So what exactly is neoliberalism, and how is it different from classical liberalism, whose final manifestation came under Keynesianism?

Neoliberalism believes that markets are self-sufficient unto themselves, that they do not need regulation, and that they are the best guarantors of human welfare. Everything that promotes the market, i.e., privatization, deregulation, mobility of finance and capital, abandonment of government-provided social welfare, and the reconception of human beings as human capital, needs to be encouraged, while everything that supposedly diminishes the market, i.e., government services, regulation, restrictions on finance and capital, and conceptualization of human beings in transcendent terms, is to be discouraged.

When Hillary Clinton frequently retorts—in response to demands for reregulation of finance, for instance—that we have to abide by “the rule of law,” this reflects a particular understanding of the law, the law as embodying the sense of the market, the law after it has undergone a revolution of reinterpretation in purely economic terms. In this revolution of the law persons have no status compared to corporations, nation-states are on their way out, and everything in turn dissolves before the abstraction called the market.

One way to sum up neoliberalism is to say that everything—everything—is to be made over in the image of the market, including the state, civil society, and of course human beings. Democracy becomes reinterpreted as the market, and politics succumbs to neoliberal economic theory, so we are speaking of the end of democratic politics as we have known it for two and a half centuries. As the market becomes an abstraction, so does democracy, but the real playing field is somewhere else, in the realm of actual economic exchange—which is not, however, the market. We may say that all exchange takes place on the neoliberal surface.

Neoliberalism is often described—and this creates a lot of confusion—as “market fundamentalism,” and while this may be true for neoliberal’s self-promotion and self-presentation, i.e., the market as the ultimate and only myth, as were the gods of the past, I would argue that in neoliberalism there is no such thing as the market as we have understood it from previous ideologies.
The neoliberal state—actually, to utter the word state seems insufficient here, I would claim that a new entity is being created, which is not the state as we have known it, but an existence that incorporates potentially all the states in the world and is something that exceeds their sum—is all-powerful, it seeks to leave no space for individual self-conception in the way that classical liberalism, and even communism and fascism to some degree, were willing to allow.

There are competing understandings of neoliberal globalization, when it comes to the question of whether the state is strong or weak compared to the primary agent of globalization, i.e., the corporation, but I am taking this logic further, I am suggesting that the issue is not how strong the state is in the service of neoliberalism, but whether there is anything left over beyond the new definition of the state. Another way to say it is that the state has become the market, the market has become the state, and therefore both have ceased to exist in the form we have classically understood them.

Of course the word hasn’t gotten around to the people yet, hence all the confusion about whether Hillary Clinton is more neoliberal than Barack Obama, or whether Donald Trump will be less neoliberal than Hillary Clinton. The project of neoliberalism—i.e., the redefinition of the state, the institutions of society, and the self—has come so far along that neoliberalism is almost beyond the need of individual entities to make or break its case. Its penetration has gone too deep, and none of the democratic figureheads that come forward can fundamentally question its efficacy.
I said almost. The reason why Bernie Sanders, self-declared democratic socialist, is so threatening to neoliberalism is that he has articulated a conception of the state, civil society, and the self that is not founded in the efficacy and rationality of the market. He does not believe—unlike Hillary Clinton—that the market can tackle climate change or income inequality or unfair health and education outcomes or racial injustice, all of which Clinton propagates. Clinton’s impending “victory” (whatever machinations were involved in engineering it) will only strengthen neoliberalism, as the force that couldn’t be defeated even when the movement was as large and transcendent as Sanders’s. Although Sanders doesn’t specify “neoliberalism” as the antagonist, his entire discourse presumes it.
Likewise, while Trump supporters want to take their rebellion in a fascist direction, their discomfort with the logic of the market is as pervasive as the Sanders camp, and is an advance, I believe, over the debt and unemployment melancholy of the Tea Party, the shame that was associated with that movement’s loss of identity as bourgeois capitalists in an age of neoliberal globalization. The Trump supporters, I believe, are no longer driven by shame, as was true of the Tea Party, and as has been true of the various dissenting movements within the Republican party, evangelical or otherwise, in the recent past. Rather, they have taken the shackles off and are ready for a no-holds barred “politically incorrect” fight with all others: they want to be “winners,” even at the cost of exterminating others, and that is not the neoliberal way, which doesn’t acknowledge that there can be winners and losers in the neoliberal hyperspace.
In the current election campaign, Hillary Clinton has been the most perfect embodiment of neoliberalism among all the candidates, she is almost its all-time ideal avatar, and I believe this explains, even if not articulated this way, the widespread discomfort among the populace toward her ascendancy. People can perceive that her ideology is founded on a conception of human beings striving relentlessly to become human capital (as her opening campaign commercial so overtly depicted), which means that those who fail to come within the purview of neoliberalism should be rigorously ostracized, punished, and excluded.
This is the dark side of neoliberalism’s ideological arm (a multiculturalism founded on human beings as capital), which is why this project has become increasingly associated with suppression of free speech and intolerance of those who refuse to go along with the kind of identity politics neoliberalism promotes.
And this explains why the 1990s saw the simultaneous and absolutely parallel rise, under the Clintons, of both neoliberal globalization and various regimes of neoliberal disciplining, such as the shaming and exclusion of former welfare recipients (every able-bodied person should be able to find work, therefore under TANF welfare was converted to a performance management system designed to enroll everyone in the workforce, even if it meant below-subsistence wages or the loss of parental responsibilities, all of it couched in the jargon of marketplace incentives).
The actual cost to the state of the AFDC program was minimal, but its symbolism was incalculable. The end of welfare went hand in hand with the disciplinary “crime bill” pushed by the Clintons, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration. Neoliberalism, unlike classical liberalism, does not permit a fluidity of self-expression as an occasional participant in the market, and posits prison as the only available alternative for anyone not willing to conceive of themselves as being present fully and always in the market.

NY Times Major Hit on Charters: A Sea of Charter Schools in Detroit Leaves Students Adrift

...the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
After her experience with the failing charter school in southwest Detroit, Ms. Rivera moved her younger son, Omar, to another charter nearby. It has had three principals in the three years since it opened. Nearly 20 teachers have left, and in January, the Wisconsin-based company that operates the school announced it was leaving. So for fifth grade she has enrolled him in a Detroit Public School, where instruction will be split between Spanish and English. “I’m a little fed up with the charters,” she said.... NY Times
The NY Times seems to have woken up to the charter school catastrophe. A major front-page piece doesn't seem to have gotten enough notice. The fact is the Detroit story is the inevitable outcome all over of the unfettered charter movement and why I oppose the very concept - schools are a public institution and so is the concept of a neighborhood school from K-12. Competition and choice is not the answer. They involve competing for the kids who can perform. Bad neighborhood schools need to have oversight. But putting in awful principals make the problem worse. Until teachers and parents get to play a major role in choosing the school leader, the system will self-destruct.

A few tidbits before you read the entire piece:
“We’re spreading the money across more and more schools; it’s no wonder that every school struggles,” said Dan Varner, the chief executive of Excellent Schools Detroit. “They’re all under-resourced.”
To throw the competition wide open, Michigan allowed an unusually large number of institutions, more than any other state, to create charters: public school districts, community colleges and universities. It gave those institutions a financial incentive: a 3 percent share of the dollars that go to the charter schools. And only they — not the governor, not the state commissioner or board of education — could shut down failing schools.
For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forcesfor unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.....
Even as Michigan and Detroit continued to hemorrhage residents, the number of schools grew. The state has nearly 220,000 fewer students than it did in 2003, but more than 100 new charter schools....
By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.
Go read it all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/for-detroits-children-more-school-choice-but-not-better-schools.html


NY Times Touches on Neo-Liberalism: In ‘Brexit’ and Trump, a Populist Farewell to Laissez-Faire Capitalism

 ...few would have guessed that the economic order built on Reagan’s and Thatcher’s common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right-wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago... Eduardo Porter, NY Times
An interesting piece though I don't agree with the way this is presented. Reagan and Thatcher were just the instruments of neo-liberalism.

The article goes into history -- the FDR New Deal save capitalism but brought in big government - social security, welfare, and even talk of a national health plan. When  people were out of work the government started conservation works to put people to work. The Keynesian view was dominant. Under neo-liberalism it is every man and woman for themselves.
Mr. Keynes’s views ultimately prevailed, though, providing the basis for a new post-World War II orthodoxy favoring active government intervention in the economy and a robust welfare state. But that era ended when skyrocketing oil prices and economic mismanagement in the 1970s brought about a combination of inflation and unemployment that fatally undermined people’s trust in the state.
I think there was more of a driving force behind this - corporate profits and tax cuts for the wealthy as a way to stimulate a falling economy - opposite of Keynesian and obviously a disaster.
The so-called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones.
Simplistic. What about the left-wing populism of Sanders?
So where does capitalism go now? What can replace a consensus built by a charismatic American president and a bull-in-a-china-shop British prime minister in favor of small governments and unrestrained markets around the world?
So where does capitalism go now? What can replace a consensus built by a charismatic American president and a bull-in-a-china-shop British prime minister in favor of small governments and unrestrained markets around the world?
There are potentially constructive approaches to set the world economy on a more promising path. For starters, what about taking advantage of rock-bottom interest rates to tap the world’s excess funds to build and repair a fraying public infrastructure? That would employ legions of blue-collar workers and help increase economic growth, which has been only inching ahead across much of the industrialized world.
Exactly what the Democratic Party has refused to address until Bernie brought it up. Note that Trump does not put forth a plan.
I laughed out loud when I read that Laurence Summers of all people has a plan. Where was he over the past 20 years?
After the Brexit vote, Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under President Clinton and one of President Obama’s top economic advisers at the nadir of the Great Recession, laid out an argument for what he called “responsible nationalism,” which focused squarely on the interests of domestic workers.
Instead of negotiating more agreements to ease business across borders, governments would focus on deals to improve labor and environmental standards internationally. They might cut deals to prevent cross-border tax evasion.
There is, however, little evidence that the world’s leaders will go down that path. Despite the case for economic stimulus, austerity still rules across much of the West. In Europe, most governments have imposed stringent budget cuts — ensuring that all but the strongest economies would stall. In the United States, political polarization has brought fiscal policy — spending and taxes — to a standstill.
 When our Democratic Party candidate is a neo-liberal and the Republicans control Congress we can expect little. How come Obama never even floated a major plan to employ people after the initial stimulus even if it would go down to defeat? Remember how much of that money went to the wealthy instead of the working people. His job was to sell that to people. Instead we ended up with the Tea Party.

The Neoliberal Prison: Brexit Hysteria and the Liberal Mind

I'm fascinated by the parallels between the Democratic Party and the Labour Party -- both parties were moved right by the Clintons and by Tony Blair. The article below is about the internal battles in the Labour Party, the British version of our Democratic Party. Labour was captured by the left - Jeremy Corbyn - let's call him a more left version of Bernie.

I'm continuing to post articles today relating to neo-liberalism and tie it to the world-wide ed deform movement as one of the major battlefields and how our union with its ties to the Democratic Party has been on the neo-liberal train since it began its ride in the early 70s with the overthrow of Allende in Chile, an act in which our own union played a minor role. (The American Federation of Teachers and the CIA by George Schmidt
This counterpunch piece by Jonathan Cook gets down to the essence. 
The Brexit vote is a huge challenge to the left to face facts. We want to believe we are free but the truth is that we have long been in a prison called neoliberalism. The Conservative and Labour parties are tied umbilically to this neoliberal order. The EU is one key institution in a transnational neoliberal club. Our economy is structured to enforce neoliberalism whoever ostensibly runs the country.
Much of the Labour shadow cabinet has just resigned and the rest of the parliamentary party are trying to defy the overwhelming democratic will of their membership and oust Corbyn. His crime is not that he supported Brexit (he didn’t dare, given the inevitable reaction of his MPs) but that he is not a true believer in the current neoliberal order, which very much includes the EU.....http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/28/the-neoliberal-prison-brexit-hysteria-and-the-liberal-mind/
Pro-EU have jumped on the left for being on the same side as Trump and other right wing forces. I have been putting up a series of articles that delves deeper into why some people who support Trump are doing it for reasons other than race and anti-immigration but rather a reaction to the outcomes of neo-liberalism. Now I think Trump is full of bullshit and is a neo-liberal himself - whereas Bernie is not. I will be putting up interesting pieces today from the NY Times which nails some good points though you won't see the term neo-liberal used too often in the Times - though I did see Laissez--Faire Capitalism.

Here are my recent pieces on this topic:

Read Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/28/the-neoliberal-prison-brexit-hysteria-and-the-liberal-mind/
or below

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Parent Opt-Out Group Slams Mulgrew Over Unity Caucus Leaflet

In addition to  providing your members with false information, you have demonized the  brave and outspoken NYC educators who have encouraged opt out. You have  inexplicably labeled these educators as “reckless and feckless”. This  begs the question, why would an experienced educator and union leader  dismiss and insult a historic act of civil disobedience? Surely, you are  aware that the opt out movement has yielded the only successful means  of resisting harmful “test and punish” policies that hurt not only your  members, but all educators and students around the state.... NYSAPE
I said right up front that the Unity Caucus attack on MORE and opt-out would come back to bite them. The UFT machine has often intimidated parent groups who wanted their support and didn't want to alienate them. When an influential statewide group like NYSAPE takes this unprecedented action it is big.
Some of my posts on this issue:
June 28, 2016


Mr. Michael Mulgrew, President
United Federation of Teachers
52 Broadway
New York, New York 10004

Dear Mr. Mulgrew,

Over  the past few years, members of the opt out movement have become adept  at distinguishing our allies from those who work against us, often  behind the scenes. In light of your recent newsletter (see below) for  the UFT’s Unity Caucus, it has become apparent which of these two camps  you are truly affiliated with.

It is no secret, Mr. Mulgrew, that  as president of the NYC teacher’s union, the UFT (the largest local  teacher’s union in the state), you wield a tremendous amount of power  within NYSUT. With approximately 800 voting delegates and the resources  needed to send all of its delegates to statewide elections, the UFT  often holds the voting majority in NYSUT. Therefore, you have the power  to sway NYSUT’s powerful lobbying dollars and efforts towards policy and  law that will either benefit or harm our children. For that reason, the  opt out movement has shifted its attention to you.

In the  outrageous document referenced above, you claim that districts have  "lost" grant money due to opt out, when in fact that money was not  theirs to begin with. You cannot "lose" something you do not already  have and are not guaranteed to be awarded. While failing to test 95% of  all students may exclude a district from APPLYING for a small monetary  grant (25,000-75,000 dollars), no money is TAKEN from a district. To  date, no school in NYS has lost money as a result of opt out numbers. On  the other hand, high stakes testing has cost school districts MILLIONS  of dollars over the past four years while the State continues to shirk  its obligation to fully fund our schools. In addition, under the new  ESSA guidelines, this reward status and grant application process comes  to an end and will no longer be a factor.

In addition to  providing your members with false information, you have demonized the  brave and outspoken NYC educators who have encouraged opt out. You have  inexplicably labeled these educators as “reckless and feckless”. This  begs the question, why would an experienced educator and union leader  dismiss and insult a historic act of civil disobedience? Surely, you are  aware that the opt out movement has yielded the only successful means  of resisting harmful “test and punish” policies that hurt not only your  members, but all educators and students around the state.

It is  no secret that you have failed to support efforts to reject the  increased focus on test scores in the new teacher evaluation plan  (3012-d), or that you have publicly vowed to defend the common core  standards (standards that even the Governor’s skewed CC task force found  to be flawed) with violence, if necessary. In addition to your  disparaging comments aimed at those who support the opt out movement,  your actions as president of the UFT would appear to reveal whose side  you are really on.

When teachers, students, and unions were being  abused, demonized, and demoralized, a call to action rang out from  grassroots parent and educator organizations. Many teachers and local  unions heeded the call. Progressive caucuses within the UFT such as MORE  and the statewide caucus Stronger Together immediately stepped up and  worked alongside parents to fight for the best interests of our  children. Where were you?

Sadly, it seems apparent, Mr. Mulgrew,  that you have been standing and working against us at every turn. Deals  have been made, hands have been shaken, and forces have aligned to quell  the increasing discontent of this growing tide of parents and educators  fighting for the very survival of our schools and the well-being of our  children. Opposition to our cause within NYSED, NYCDOE, USDOE as well  as those who support illogical and damaging education policies have  found an unlikely partner in you.

While your actions speak  volumes, we urge you to prove us wrong and demonstrate that you are in  fact, an ally of the opt out movement. Take a stand against a corrupt  and harmful test-based accountability system, advocate for research and  evidence-based education policies, and respect teachers, parents, and  students who advocate the use of test refusal as a means of impacting  policy and regulatory change.

We think it only fair to inform you  that should the educators of New York City and New York State seek new  leadership in their elected union officials, the parents of New York  will stand in solidarity with those who seek to safeguard public  education from harmful policies, regulations, and corrupt leadership.

Sincerely,


New York State Allies for Public Education


Explaining the Democratic Party and the UFT: Liberals and Neo-liberalism

https://youtu.be/GD5wa7duofo


There's something underlying the so-called populist reaction to impact of globalization, free markets, open borders, the loss of - or the movement of - jobs from industrialized nations to 3rd world. So we need to explore the concepts of liberalism and how it morphs into today's version, neo-liberalism.

The Clinton/Bernie battle can be boiled down into pro and anti neo-liberalism. 

I'm posting this as a way to dig down on some of the issues that tie our union to the Democratic Party even though it has morphed into the left flank of the Republican Party - so-called Rockefeller Republicans -- but even beyond. Obama and the Clintons and most Democrats today are examples as they have abandoned FDR''s New Deal piece by piece. Bernie on the other hand is a classic New Deal Democrat. Our own union while giving lip-service to New Deal ideals has gone along.

It is no accident that Richard Kahlenberg's "Albert Shanker, Tough Liberal" bio was backed by the union AND Deformer in chief Eli Broad. In our review of the book, Vera Pavone and I rebranded Shanker for what he was - Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neo-Con | New Politics

The bio was aiming to square the union's going along with ed deform as a positive classical liberal idea based on the 1960s concept of liberalism when in reality they were justifying neo-liberalism - the book emphasized Shanker's ties to both Reagan and the Clintons where the basics of ed deform were laid.
One of the tenets of NL: Reagan's "Government not the solution, but the problem." That private can do anything better than government.

Ed deform is the perfect example of neo-liberalism. Get rid of the public schools. Ed deform actually oozes out of every pore. Some elements of neo-liberlism - see if you recognize any in ed deform:
The main points of neo-liberalism include:

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Whither MORE: Can We Talk About So Many Things? ICE Meeting Will Do Just That

There has been so much to comment on that I have been paralyzed in just making a decision.

I do want to celebrate the last day of school for all of you after what I am sure is a tough year. This day was always the happiest day - and in some ways the saddest day (when I was teaching my own class for 18 years) of the year. We would party and then I would wake up the next morning in the most relaxed state of the year - until I realized there was now only 67 days left before we had to go back.

ICE often meets on June 30 to tie up the year and discuss issues that don't get discussed in depth at the crowded MORE meetings.

There is an interesting discussion going on around the way forward for MORE. Some people think MORE should focus in social justice issues. Others think the primary role of a caucus is to focus on issues of concern to the rank and file while not neglecting social justice issues. I believe there are very few people in MORE who think MORE should not worry about SJ issues at all, but there are some. Related to these issues is who is the target audience?

Depends on the extent you think you can really contend for power. Do you want to win over the right wing anti-Unity people by diluting your politics?

Some people in MORE are concerned about dilution. I am not. What concerns me is the use of naked rhetoric about some issues without explanation. I try to put myself in the position of a rank and file person in the schools.

I believe, as the discussion below demonstrates, that as long as MORE takes care of day to day school issues it can also take strong SJ positions. Some anti-Unity people will never vote for MORE as being too left wing. To them I say - go form your own caucus and do the work. MORE has proven itself as a viable alternative to Unity. If you are an ATR and don't think MORE is doing enough MORE is perfectly open to anyone coming in and making that an important issue. You can't do it from an anon comment on blogs.

There are certainly points of intersection where some of these issues clash -- I would say school discipline is a potential dividing point. If MORE takes a strong position on discipline for the kids it must also address the very real issues facing teachers and other school staff. It is easy to call for more resources and a viable (not bullshit) restorative justice program. But when you have an awful principal and a school out of control MORE must address that issue.

Sometimes I see some people in MORE salivate over issues like supporting the teachers in Mexico but get a dull glaze in their eyes when it comes to supporting the teachers in NYC. I get it. Going to a rally for Mexican teachers or raising money is easy. Figuring out how to fight an abusive principal is hard if not impossible. But enough people in MORE are trying - see my upcoming videos of the PEP meeting last week were we stood up and supported people.

Some of my recent posts about Brexit have raised the issue of Trump voters and MORE with some snarky Unity comments about Roseanne's support for MORE and Trump. Actually Roseanne and other Trump people do not actually support Trump - they just despise the Democrats, Randi and Hillary and the ed deformers. But still a vote for Trump in essence endorses and gets counted as a vote for white supremacy and therein lies my attempt to convince these people to vote 3rd party. I do believe that Trump will take away people's rights and get away with it.

So in that context I present the upcoming ICE meeting on Thursday with the email I sent out to ICE and MORE members.

ICE meeting Thurs June 30 3:30 - whenever the rice pudding is served

Reminder for those interested - RSVP as space is limited.
Another open-ended ICE meeting to talk about whatever is on your mind.

For those new to MORE, ICE, founded in late 2003 and with TJC another founding group, won the high school exec bd seats in the 2004 election,  was one of the founding groups and still meets a few times a year to discuss issues in depth and maintain a blog run by James Eterno.

Send agenda items - indicating we may go till midnight.

1. Further analysis of the vote in the election. Where did those 11000 votes come from?
Make your best guess. How many due to SJ politics of MORE, how many due to knowing someone in MORE they trust, How many due to MORE support for teacher rights? Consider the 1400 votes for Solidarity in the equation.

2. ATRs - updates and proposals for solutions. Getting ATRS involved in their own battle.

3. Fair Student Funding discussion - won't be discussed until 4:30 since some people can't make it until then. Understanding Fair School Funding - the complexities of calling for an end.

4. Prep for MORE July 6 summer event -- supporting chapters, training etc.

5. MORE and New Action and other caucuses.
New Action has proposed MORE and they sit down and talk. In that context ----
History of UFT Caucus discussion - Election coalitions and the big tent caucus
   History shows that over time mere election coalitions don't work out and eventually lead to merger -- ie TAC and New Directions took 20 years to come together in 1995 into NAC and ICE and TJC took 10 years to morph into MORE.
What do we learn from those experiences? How can a big tent caucus operate with a wide disparity of views?

A MORE retiree committee - what would it do? -- can it work with New Action retirees?
6. MORE as a caucus -- has it shown it can compete for power in the UFT? Does MORE have to compromise fundamental principals to do so? Can people who support Trump also support MORE?
What exactly is a caucus in the UFT? Must you run in an election to be a caucus? Is ICE a caucus or a sub-group within MORE? Can a caucus be a lobby group in the UFT only? What is the future of the relationship between New Action and MORE? How is ICE different from New Action? Is there room in a left-leaning caucus for center right including Trump voters?

Is there is a non-left anti-Unity sentiment in the UFT and how does a left-caucus relate to it? Unity caucus comments on this issue - for 50 years they have branded the opposition as left wing fundamentalists - does Unity see the fact that non-leftists can support MORE as a threat?

Roseanne McCosh who signed up 30 MORE members in her school may vote for Trump out of her outrage at Hillary, Randi and the Democratic party - so are other teachers who are not right wing I meet. I think they are wrong and should vote 3rd party.

Unity people have jumped onto the comment section to chide  MORE for allowing people who are not left fundamentalists - as the Unity hack put it. I guess they want MORE to have loyalty oaths like they do.
(You can follow the debate in the comments: http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2016/06/does-brexit-shock-and-awe-forecast.html#comment-form

Roseanne response:
Let's take a look at what MORE is against. MORE is against teacher evaluations being tied to test scores. Against high class size. Against the persecution of teachers in the opt out movement. Against the 2nd tier status of ATR union members. Against a bullshit contract and delay in retro. Against abusive administrators who torment members. And---OMG! Against racism...how dare they? If knowing I support MORE gives you a chuckle then I guess you'll split your sides knowing I also send them a monthly donation. People like me support MORE because MORE supports working teachers---a foreign concept to you Unity shills.
 
Roseanne McCosh

Monday, June 27, 2016

The Tories Made Their Neo-Liberal Bed....

So the austerity Tory (Brit Republicans) neo-liberals from Thatcher to Cameron have driven a stake into the economy and now must live with it while Labor (Brit Democrats) Tony Blair and even the current so-called left leader sailed along and are now undergoing divisions. The strongest party in Britain seems to be the Scotish nationalists who will soon hold their own ScEXIT and stay with Europe with Ireland to follow. Great Britain is getting slimmer. Oh Boris, have fun while you are prime minister for your very few minutes in the sun.

After this vote the UK is diminished, our politics poisoned


Meanwhile a section of London-based commentariat anthropologised the British working class as though they were a lesser evolved breed from distant parts, all too often portraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them. Having assumed themselves cosmopolitan, the more self-aware pundits began to realise just how parochial they were: having experienced much of the world, they discovered they didn’t know their own country as well as they might.

But if the remain campaign was incompetent and patronising, leave was both inflammatory and irresponsible.

It is a banal axiom to insist that “it’s not racist to talk about immigration”. It’s not racist to talk about black people, Jews or Muslims either. The issue is not whether you talk about them but how you talk about them and whether they ever get a chance to talk for themselves. When you dehumanise migrants, using vile imagery and language, scapegoating them for a nation’s ills and targeting them as job-stealing interlopers, you stoke prejudice and foment hatred.
The chutzpah with which the Tory right – the very people who had pioneered austerity, damaging jobs, services and communities – blamed migrants for the lack of resources was breathtaking. The mendacity with which a section of the press fanned those flames was nauseating. The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.

Not everyone, or even most, of the people who voted leave were driven by racism. But the leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation.

More
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned-racism


Saturday, June 25, 2016

Dexit -World-Wide Populist Revolt Against Elite from Left and Right Spells Bad News for Both Parties in Long Run

Dexit is the theme of this post. Which I stole from Sean Crowley who says he stole it from a comment on Arthur's blog. There's a good facebook debate going on regarding the Democratic Party. Stay and fight or go? Arthur linked to an interesting piece (see below) with this comment:
At this point the only reason I remain a Democrat is to vote in the primaries. Obama fooled me once, broke my heart, and left me awfully skeptical. Who's gonna stand up for working Americans? We have a governor who ran on a platform of going after unions and a presidential candidate who talks school closings, opposes a living wage, and says we're never gonna get single payer. Who've we got left to support?
On the larger scale it may mean we are revisiting the 1920s-40s of a century ago. Are the dictators coming? Hitler was once a funny little man with an even funnier mustache who was ridiculed. 


Here are a few notes I took yesterday as the Brexit story unfolded:
Does history repeat itself? Will it?

Are we entering a version of global politics of a century ago? Will the 2020s be like the 1920s? Will the 2030s be like the 1930s?

Isolationism
coming apart of 70 year post ww2 euro unity?
resurgent nationalism
economic dislocation helps the right - dictators all over the place

Separate Trump the man from some of the ideology. Imagine a slicker Trump? Marine la Pen disavowed her Trump-like father to slicken up the message. Hungry, Poland, etc. on the right.

Have Al Quada and ISIS won by destabilizing the west? Putin too?

Elites in all countries flourished while manufacturing and other jobs disappeared - elites - Dems and Rep - said or did nothing - didn't care.
There is a lot of anti-Democratic Party and anti-Hillary stuff floating around today. I mean Cuomo is the NY State chair for the convention? Vomit now.

Dear Democratic Party, I’m Leaving You and I’m Taking the Kids

I want to believe we can save the Democratic Party…
But if we can’t, we will walk away..
And build something new and inspiring.....

https://theindependentthinker2016.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/dear-democratic-party-im-leaving-you-and-im-taking-the-kids/
I have too much to say in one post. There are a few things floating around that should be of concern to Hillary and her Randi acolyte, especially after the Brexit vote. I know the things we hear about the differences from here - Britain is 85% white and we are 66% white - and that is a big difference. If the Republicans had a slicker less onerous candidate than Trump it would be a landslide for them and might come close to wiping out the Democratic Party - my only hope that something new could rise in its place - shades of the 1850s.

There are lots of comments on  my post:  Does Brexit Shock and Awe Forecast POTUS Election - and UFT Internals too

One comment said:
Trump is a "slicker" Ross Perot. Remember how right Perot was ? "That giant sucking sound" you hear are all of the jobs that will leave the U.S. with acts like NAFTA. Well, he was completely correct ! Now that giant sucking sound is the entire country now, across the board.
Good point - except for the followup comments that Obama is a racist - like saying Obama is a socialist. Even if you believe that don't share it because it negates the good points made. Obama leaned over backwards to minimize race - and why do you consider him black when he is half white? He may look black but he was brought up white - and the very fact that he had to deal with issues which related to how he looked on the outside is the very essence of why people of color have different experiences. Do you doubt that if Obama looked like his mother his life would have been different? Then you'd recognize the essence of institutional racism. And imagine how so many white people who think of blacks as lower than them are seething every time they see the WHITE HOUSE in the hands of the Obamas.

A comment from Roseanne McCosh on why she is voting for Trump:
If Trump wins, it will be the anti politics-as-usual wave that carries him to the White House. I rode the wave with Bernie and will now ride the wave with Trump. I truly see it as the only way to wake up the Democratic Party. I understand that people may disagree with those who think like I do but what I can't understand is how you can't understand why people like me are voting for Trump. Claims that we aren't "thinking people" or mocking his hair and his speech impediment don't matter to Trump supporters. Some buy his rhetoric. Others, like myself, are willing to accept whatever comes our way with him because we are tired of being told by dems that they are on the side of working and middle class people while their actions contradict their words. Obama was bad for teachers. Clinton will be bad for teachers. Cuomo is bad for teachers. Dems have not been good for unionized workers at all. So there really is no difference between them and the republicans other than the republicans tell us up front that they hate us. As I said....I get it if you disagree. If you think Clinton will be a better president than Trump, you have your reasons and that's your right. But to claim you don't understand why Trump has more than neandertals and racists supporting him means you just don't want to understand. Plenty of teachers and other unionized workers I know are voting for Trump--and they are not racist idiots. They, like me, are tired of the democrats and their bullshit. And as a result, we are willing to back the other guy because we genuinely believe that a vote for Clinton is telling the democrats it's okay to screw us anytime you want because we will give you our vote regardless of what you do. I'm not willing to do that anymore. And I'm also no longer willing to give my vote to a third party that has zero chance of winning. The mere fact that Clinton was endorsed by Randi, who sells us out time and time again, is reason enough for me to vote for Trump. If every teacher committed to voting for the guy/gal Randi doesn't want us to vote for, her political clout would be gone. Agree or disagree but please stop saying you don't understand why. Roseanne McCosh reply to EdNotes: Does Brexit Shock and Awe Forecast POTUS ...":
Roseanne is not voting for Trump because she loves him but because she hates the Dems more. I and many others agree with her - floating around now is: the lesser of 2 evils is still evil. [Make sure to read the loyalty oath signing Unity slug comment on how MORE can accept a Trump supporter].

I think she is wrong to vote for Trump - she may not be a racist but she is joining racist KKK people with her vote --- white supremacists will vote in droves for Trump -- if I went into a voting booth and voted for him I would feel their slime. If your conscience won't let you vote for Hillary there has to be a conscience about a Trump vote.

But some of Roseanne's rationale for the "benefits" of a Trump win are not nuts. Hillary wins and we are now talking lesser of 2 evils in 2020 - and she could easily lose in 2020. Roseanne puts forth the Trump-apocalypse  theory -- he can destroy the Republican Party while the left undoes the Dems.

I disagree with Roseanne on the 3rd party vote -- The Democratic Party will not change - they will keep putting up phony fronts. Only a growing 3rd party can really stop them - it happened very fast in Italy over the past few years. I don't know if Green is the answer but if the Bernie people get active there is a chance. Jill Stein is polling 7% right now - the difference between Hillary and Trump. So a vote for Green builds the cache and influence of a 3rd party - only that threat will force change om the Dems. And really, if Trump turns into the North Korean guy you may not want your vote for him on your conscience.

Here is food for thought:


https://theindependentthinker2016.wordpress.com/2016/06/23/dear-democratic-party-im-leaving-you-and-im-taking-the-kids/

Norm's 2 columns in the Wave: On Ed Policy, It’s Democrats vs. Democrats Plus RTC on Follies



School Scope: On Ed Policy, It’s Democrats vs. Democrats
By Norm Scott

I’ve been writing in this space on education policy for about a dozen years. About the massive nationwide assault by both political parties on educators, their unions,  the concept of the local community school as a neighborhood hub, the use of high stakes testing as an instrument and charter schools as the spearhead of disruption. Let me restate this point in bold letters – BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES – in case you are now aware, known as the Republicans and the Democrats. While there are some differences – the Dems moderate their positions just enough to keep a carrot in front of the teacher unions so they keep running after each other. But make no mistake about it – both parties deserve the label of “ed deformers.”

As a left leaning Bernie Sanders supporting social democrat, I’ve been particularly harsh on the Dems who should be the natural allies of teachers and their unions and on the surface they seem to be. On the surface. But just witness the new NY State law extending mayoral control by one year but handing another giveback to the charter school lobby.

Jeff Bryant has an interesting article in Common Dreams, How Long Can Big Money Keep Democrats In The Charter School Camp?

Bryant points to the recent California primary. “While the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ran on populist platforms denouncing “the corrosive role of money in politics” and “condemning the plutocratic consequences of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,” many Democratic Party candidates down ticket funded their campaigns with big money from two corporate interests. One interest flooding the election with campaign donations is hardly new to the scene. For decades, the petroleum industry has stuffed the coffers of candidates in both parties to ensure legislation continues to favor oil consumption, stall alternative energy sources, and ensure lax environmental regulations. The other source of corporate cash in Democratic politics is much newer: charter schools. ….Many Democratic Party candidates relied on money from the petroleum industry and “education reform” advocates backing charter schools to win their contests over more progressive candidates.”

Obama is a Republican on ed policy
While be see a barrage of criticism from Republicans over anything Obama should happen to do  no matter how insignificant, one thing you will not hear is criticism of anything he has done on education. Hillary will continue most of these policies. Trump? Don’t even think about it. Educators who call themselves Republicans are basically voting to end their life work. Just desserts for these people, especially those on pensions would can watch their hero executing an overt attack on their pensions as being “too expensive” and urging us to take 25 cents on the dollar to “make America great again.”

When it comes to ed policy the charter industry doesn’t even have to worry about the Republicans.

Back to Bryant: “According to a report from the Center for Media and Democracy, an organization calling itself Democrats for Education Reform has been effective in a number of states at getting Democratic candidates to team up with traditionally Republican-leaning financial interests to defeat any attempts to question rapid expansions of unregulated charter schools. According to the CMD study, DEFR is a PAC “co-founded by hedge fund managers” to funnel “dark money” into “expenditures, like mass mailings or ads supporting particular politicians, that were ‘independent’ and not to be coordinated with the candidates’ campaigns.” The organization and its parent entity also have ties to FOX’s Rupert Murdoch and Charles and David Koch.”

With Bernie pretty much done for pro-public education supporters are left with little choice in the election. (Not that Bernie has said very much about education.) We know that the Clintons have been ed deformers since their Arkansas days. Observers of the UFT and AFT, our local and national unions also note that our own unions have been allied with the Clintons on education policy since the alliance built with the Clintons in the 80s by the late Albert Shanker. While if I were the deciding vote I would still vote for Hillary over Trump, as a NY State voter I think I can afford to vote “other” and still not help Trump get elected. I don’t stop at ed policy. We need massive reform at all levels of policy.

I want to continue to make a point that neither of the parties in our 2-party system is satisfactory to me and what is needed is a 3rd force as we are seeing in Italy where the 7-year old Five Star Movement just elected female mayors of Rome and Turin. I can only hope the Bernie movement goes beyond Bernie. This past weekend a couple of hundred Bernie people met in Chicago to plan future actions which include beginning to get involved in local politics to either change the Democratic Party from the grass roots are start a 3rd way real reform movement like 5 Star.

Next: Why can’t a so-called progressive Dem who is bringing Rockaway a subsidized ferry at metrocard rates find love in Rockaway?

See Norm fume at ednotesonline.org.
Here is my RTC column
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Memo from the RTC: Final Follies Kudos as La Cage Aux Folles is Coming
By Norm Scott

Well, the Follies set is down and La Cage… (opening August 4) is on the way up as the rehearsal schedule begins getting intense. There are so many sets for Tony Homsey and crew to build, there may be scarcely a tree left standing on Rockaway.

I had to miss the final two performances of Follies at the Rockaway Theatre Company this past weekend (and the cast party) because we had tickets to see the legendary Brian Wilson sans the rest of the Beach Boys (except for Al Jardine) at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. I’m still feeling those good vibrations so I want to say a few final words about the show, the cast and the behind scenes people involved in this complex production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Many people just don’t like Sondheim music or shows and so there was some resistance even within the RTC family. So the show got mixed reviews. Even one of the lead actors made some comments early in rehearsals about how he was not a fan. Yet by the end of the run he was totally enveloped. I found myself running song after song in my head all day – once in a while I even broke out into song, only to see my cat (and my wife) cover their ears.

The Sunday June 11 matinee had to survive a crisis as the fire on Flatbush Ave closed down the Gil Hodges bridge and delayed 3 performers by an hour and a half. The audience was offered their money back if they couldn’t stay for the delayed performance, which began at 3:30. Most remained and were treated to pie, coffee and ad hoc performances by various members of the cast who came out and sang for them. When the show ended around 6PM there was a palpable love fest between audience and cast.

Director Peggy Page Press threw herself into the project with enormous energy and commitment (12 facebook or more cheerleading and encouraging messages a day) and the cast and production crew came through with flying colors. Peggy’s usual partner, Michael Wotypka, co-directed. There are the usual dedicated suspects who delivered a bang-up job. Music director and sound designer Richard Louis-Pierre and Choreographer Nicole DePierro-Nellen played primary roles and will also be doing the upcoming La Cage…. Costumier Kerry O’Conner, despite being very pregnant, was in charge of what was one of the most complex costuming jobs the RTC has seen. Andrew Woodridge, as always, took care of the increasingly professional lighting.

One of the major jobs on any show is the sound technician who must make 20 remote mics work so the actors can be heard. This job fell to 15-year old Alex Stabiner who Peggy praised as one of the heroes of the production for taking on this complex task with humor and dedication. Also behind the scenes were RTC Young People regulars Mia Melchiorri and Reilly Mangano who were racing around all over the place taking on tasks that needed to get done. I find one of the most impressive things about Peggy is her faith in kids as performers and back-stage people. Our current 20-something crew came up through these ranks over the past dozen years and this 3rd generation is so hooked on the RTC we know things will be in good hands for a long time to come.

In addition to doing the Wave’s School Scope column, Norm blogs about education and politics at ednotesonline.org.

Friday, June 24, 2016

UPDATED: Does Brexit Shock and Awe Forecast POTUS Election - and UFT Internals too

Will we be shocked to wake up in November to a President Trump?

Trump is in Scotland on the very day of the major shock over Britain's exit. I can see the same kind of surprise in November since many of the same issues in Britain and all over Europe are operating here. One of the themes is that the wealthy/elite/liberals/neoliberals were opposed to Brexit while the working class was for it.

In the primaries, Bernie and Trump seemed to capture some of those same political winds albeit from different directions. Hillary and the Bushes in many ways were more aligned than may seem obvious.

I think this will be going on all over Europe as the right rises. And it will go on here too to some extent -- but the left may be rising too -- so maybe we will end up in another civil war.

Now let me leap to some internal debates that have been taking place and will be taking place in MORE -- a sense of people at elite schools don't feel the same kind of pressure that most of the rest of the UFT members face. I feel a similar yin-yang going on but then again I may be looking too deep.

Anyway - Michael Fiorillo sent this along which touches on some of these issues with this comment:
Worth reading, if only because it takes a far more honest view of class conflict than mainstream, Clintonian "liberalism" does

Why Clinton Lost So Many Democrats

Almost half of her party—and more than two-thirds of its youth—want a different kind of liberalism.


The decisive factor in Hillary Clinton’s victory over Bernie Sanders was her rock-solid support from upscale liberals voting primarily on culture-war issues. White Democrats, in other words, largely voted along class lines.
This was most starkly illustrated when the New York Times published a map of how every precinct in the five boroughs voted in April, with Hillary completely sweeping Brownstone Brooklyn and all of Manhattan save a few lonely precincts on the Lower East Side. It was first seen as early as March 1 in Massachusetts, when Cambridge and its bedroom satellite Lexington put Clinton over the top by a fraction of a percent. And it ensured her consolidating victories throughout the Northeast and finally in California.
The urgent wake-up call that these facts should present to the Democratic leadership is this: While Hillary won the upscale white liberals and minorities who “look like the Democratic Party”—indeed, she lost among registered Democrats only in Vermont and New Hampshire—she still won only 54 percent of the primary vote, and she lost young voters by nearly three-to-one.
The turbulence of this election is best understood as the end of the era that began with the election of 1968, defined by the numerous domestic consequences of the Vietnam War. Published the following year, The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips remains the indispensable chronicle of the historical forces that led up to that election, as well as the most breathtakingly accurate forecast of its long-term aftermath. Phillips bluntly described the diminished Democratic Party that would face the Nixon/Reagan supermajority as “the party of the Establishmentarian Northeast and Negro South.” The generation of progressives shaped by this tumult reached its apotheosis in Hillary Clinton’s present campaign.
The presidential contender who set the tone of American liberalism for the epoch that began in 1968 was not a high-minded representative of Cold War liberalism’s better half such as Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, but Bobby Kennedy, whose campaign represented an odd alliance of the Democratic establishment with such New Left ideologues as Tom Hayden. The politics of Vietnam have obscured the early history of the New Left, which was deeply invested in the idealism of the Great Society—an idealism that Kennedy most effectively channeled.
In his widely praised book The Agony of the American Left, Christopher Lasch diagnosed the fatally limited imagination of this species of leftism. In discussing the lionization of such early-20th-century anarchists as “Big Bill” Haywood and the IWW, Lasch explained that “Haywood’s militancy, his advocacy of violence and sabotage … and his view of radicalism as a movement based on marginal people, all correspond to the anti-intellectual proclivities of the contemporary student left.” Oddly enough, this proved a comfortable fit for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which was directed at such marginal populations as Appalachian coal miners and the black urban poor, as opposed to the more nationally unifying, and thus naturally more popular, programs of the New Deal.
Whatever one’s opinion of Bernie Sanders’s proposals for single-payer health care, tuition-free public college, and a massive reinvestment in infrastructure, they have reemphasized why the New Deal was popular and the Great Society was not. This is a fundamental break from the pattern of missionary progressivism by what in the 1970s was called “the new class” of affluent professionals, typified by the Great Society and over the following decades increasingly conflated with culture-war priorities.
This is the source of the biggest misunderstanding of the Sanders phenomenon by the generation of liberals formed by 1968 and its aftermath. Even older Sanders supporters, hailing from that milieu themselves, have typically assumed that the campaign is merely the latest in a predictable cycle of generational struggle between youthful “egalitarians” and wizened “politicians” (to borrow from the title of the suspiciously timed new book by Sean Wilentz, who is perfectly representative of this conceit as both an ardent Clintonite and nostalgic son of postwar Greenwich Village).
But Phillips provides a clearer insight into what presently roils American liberalism. Perhaps nothing is more striking to the retrospective reader of The Emerging Republican Majority than how completely marginal, if not irrelevant, was the drama of the New Left to the causes of the realignment that led to the Nixon/Reagan supermajority. Phillips recognized what was lost on the political and media elite of the 1960s and ’70s—that the emergence of this supermajority, not the campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, was the real story of 1968.
Much of the political story of the past few years should be understood as the unfolding consequences of a highly analogous situation among the millennial generation. The privileged student radicals of 1968 became the vanguard of the new class, which, despite its electoral marginality, defined American liberalism for the next five decades. Their children, inheriting their values, advanced their cause both in the prestige media and as the loudest, most aggressive voices on elite campuses. Today, that prosperous elite is ever-more isolated from the social and economic devastation that has gripped most of the country.
The overwhelming preference of millennials for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton—and the not-insignificant showing of millennial support for Donald Trump—has thus been a revolt by that generation’s masses against their appointed representatives in prestige media, who were largely responsible for creating the illusions about the mood of the country that have set the tone and underlying assumptions for the Clinton campaign.
This self-satisfied culture-war extremism might have been tolerated by most millennials had it not become the hallmark of open class contempt. But it is no accident that leading corporate liberal publications, from The Atlantic to Slate to New York, traffic in the most unrestrained identity politics, belligerence, and transgender extremism while their mostly young writers have also been the most supportive of Clinton and critical of Sanders.
It may be extremely sobering that Hillary Clinton’s only challenger for the Democratic nomination was both a lifelong independent and a representative of the aging Jewish cohort that is perhaps the last surviving segment of voters with a serious attachment to the class-solidarity appeal of the New Deal Democrats. But it is at least as revealing that only such a man as Bernie Sanders could have rallied the economically hard-pressed youth of America behind a future they could believe in, just as it is now clear that only a human wrecking ball such as Donald Trump could have finally dislodged and buried the rotting corpse of the historic conservative movement.
Many longstanding assumptions about the future of American politics are likely to be exploded over the next several months. Polls have been showing Clinton and Trump running about evenly among millennials, and Nate Cohn of the New York Times has laid out data undermining the assumption of a declining white electorate. Meanwhile, a millennial supermajority that rejects its politically correct mouthpieces, not unlike the boomer supermajority that rejected the New Left, is coming into view.
To be sure, that majority is firmly committed to social and economic policies that are far closer to those of Bernie Sanders than to those of Ronald Reagan. But it is precisely because the liberal culture-war catechism is so totally losing resonance with them—not to mention the slaying of the Reagan policy paradigm by Trump—that the liberal pundit class is invoking that catechism with increasing hysteria. This election will do much to determine how the millennial majority ultimately takes shape.
If Trump wins, the combination of his likely one-term disaster and the shock of a Clinton loss will likely open the way for a lasting generational transformation of the Democratic Party. Unless Trump loses in a landslide, which looks increasingly unlikely, there is no going back to the old order for the Republicans, in which case they could still thwart the emerging Democratic majority of the past decade. Yet the success of the Sanders campaign has made clear that if, as some have suggested, the coming realignment is between the Bloomberg party and the Trump party, the former cannot long survive.
The legacy of the Bernie Sanders campaign will have been to reveal that for the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, the twin legacies of the 1960s—in both the party establishment and its ideological base—are at long last at death’s door.
Jack Ross is the author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History and the forthcoming The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism, on the history of the present political moment inspired by the scholarship of Kevin Phillips.
Here is another point of view from Daily Kos. I don't quite agree since there is a lot more devastation in this ecomony than it admits too and the effects of globalization are a reason in part.

By Laurence Lewis   
You’re going to be reading a lot of stories about the Brexit vote being a warning that Donald Trump can win. Those stories will be wrong.
Brexit apparently has won, and the primary reason is the economic turmoil wrought by the greed and at times open cruelty of British austerity, as imposed by David Cameron and George Osborne. Labour didn’t run against austerity in the last British election, and was punished for it. The British people were punished with more austerity. A brutal economy always feeds extremism, and that is how Britain got Brexit. The irony was that Cameron and Osborne had to fight desperately against the consequences of their own policies. And if you think I’m ignoring Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, that’s because he was almost invisible during the Remain campaign, and his support was tepid if not feigned. Britain has austerity and no credible national leaders. Hence Brexit.
While much of Europe was electing right wing governments that imposed austerity, the United States was electing Barack Obama. The Obama stimulus was a starkly different approach from European austerity. A larger stimulus would have done more to fuel a robust recovery, but the stimulus that was enacted stopped the economic free fall, and got the United States back on the right track. More needs to be done, and will be done, but the difference with Europe and particularly Britain is obvious. The extremism fueling the Trump campaign is neither as broad or deep as the extremism fueling Brexit. Because President Obama and Congressional Democrats ensured that the United States did not end up with the sort of brutal economic program the Republicans would have imposed, and that Cameron and Osborne in Britain did impose.
Simply put, the extremism fueling Brexit does not have the same resonance in the United States. Because our economy is not suffering the way Britain’s economy is suffering. And the economic agenda of Hillary Clinton is very deliberately designed to build on the success of the Obama economic agenda. The United States has alternatives that Britain did not have. And the United States will not follow Britain’s path into extremism because it hasn’t been on a parallel economic path.