Lunatic Fringe Gets Closer

With Paul Ryan now potentially the proverbial heartbeat from leadership of the most powerful war machine on the planet, the lunatic fringe is even better poised to take power than I had feared. (See earlier post, "A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power"). To borrow Hannah Arendt's insight, the reaction of the mainstream media in this country is to treat evil as banal.  Paul Ryan is universally described, even by his supposed opposition among Democrats as "a nice guy," as they feel behooved--in spite of being perfectly aware of his fanatical extremism--to reassure the public that this guy is mainstream.  Some commentators point to his collegiality with his Democratic Party counterpart, the talented Democratic congressman, Chris Van Hollen, as evidence.  I don't know how many Americans have watched the two together on C-Span broadcasts of House budget hearings, but to mistake for chumminess the behavior of Van Hollen, who relates to Ryan the way any individual would who is forced to work with a maniac, would be to miss all the obvious signs.  "Look, I have to deal with this guy, so it is only politic to pretend that he is normal."  Even the president has taken this line.  "Great family man, buuuttt..."
      Ryan is no Sarah Palin.  He may prove more a deficit than a benefit to the Romney campaign, but he knows you can't see Russia from Alaska.  No doubt hand-picked and destined for his present role as high priest of the "starve the beast" school by virtue of his undeniable intelligence, quickness and fundamental conservatism, Ryan got his education at the feet of Jack Kemp and the National Review cabal.  He bears some remarkable similarities to the late William F. Buckley, even possessing some of Buckley's sometimes alarming physical quirks--the leering smile in the face of evil, the eyes shining with the one true faith, the barely restrained mean-spiritedness, everything but that serpentine tongue-lolling that, in Buckley, signified that he could pick up the scent of evil with the tip of his tongue, rather like a rattler in the presence of rodent prey.  Like Buckley, Ryan is Roman Catholic.  This, in itself, gives rise to some interesting aspects of both the present ethos as well as the dynamics of the upcoming election.  With a Mormon and a Catholic the Republican nominees, this will be the first time in American history that neither candidate for these high offices will be Protestant.
     The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that still runs this country has apparently decided, during these dark times, to retreat to their country clubs, foreign villas and pieds-a-terre with just occasional excursions to Bilderberg conferences to keep an eye on things.  Five of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic.  Once about as popular with elite WASPs as they were with the KKK, Catholics and Jews are now everywhere in the corridors of government.  Both groups are perfectly suited to the role of gatekeepers in society where the mob (You know, like those Europeans who take to the street at the drop of a hat) may rise up with its pitchforks or, in this country, where it is perfectly acceptable to own such weapons, AR-15s and Ak-47s.  Though not universally held ideas within Judaism and Catholicism, there are major strains within both faiths or cultures that portray the average person as child-like, not fully developed, in need of restraining influences.  For Jews, the vulgar expression of this sensibility is summed up in the expression a goyische kup, strictly translated, a gentile or Christian head, and therefore, well...frankly, not too bright.  For Catholics, the vulgar expression is actually also the dominant one.  Their spiritual mentors are called "Father" for good reason.  Born with original sin, they tend to keep on sinning, confessing, sinning again, infant baptism having only the briefest cleansing effect.  They need to be controlled, for, given the least opportunity, they descend into all sorts of chaotic behavior, particularly of the sexual variety.  Thus the church's stand not merely against abortion, but also its seemingly perverse stand against contraception (which, though it provides an answer to unwanted pregnancies, also allows one to have worry-free, if not guilt-free, sex).
     The danger exists that the Republican handlers will do their best to keep the real Ryan under wraps, that is to keep the American people from seeing a fanatic acolyte of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, until the election is over, and it is too late.  But, to those who can decipher his barely disguised code, Ryan seems unlikely to be able to stop himself.  One of his earliest pronouncements is that “America is more than just a place…it's an idea. It's the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not government."  One has to wonder even in this case if a handler persuaded him to put "nature" first, giving God second billing.  Embedded in the statement is the ongoing struggle of the right to convert the founding fathers to good, orthodox Christians, rather than the children of Rousseau and the Enlightenment, deists and pantheists that they actually were.  Thus the sidelong reference to nature, effectively preserving Ryan's intellectual credentials while counting on the right wing base to slough over the nature bit and only hear mention of the godhead.  Good, old-fashioned, sterling silver demagoguery.  Or, at the risk of seeming to grind an anti-Catholic axe, such delicate conceits are reminiscent of nothing so much as the tactics of that sect within the faith that once led proper Protestants to coin the term "bejesuited" as a term of opprobrium.
     Most of the corporate media is already well under way to "cover" the issues in the upcoming election--cover, that is, in its primary sense of conceal, rather than expose.  We have immediately been made the victims of a flood of stories on the supposed meaning of Ryan's candidacy only to find that attention is paid to his influence on blue states and red states rather than to his extremist ideology.  Let us look forward to the debates.  Joe Biden, perhaps the last Roosevelt Democrat holding any office, treated Sarah Palin gently, being the gentleman that he is, but, hopefully, we will have a Joseph N. Welch vs. Joe McCarthy moment in which the old war horse will expose Paul Ryan for the fanatic he really is.  If we are going to regress to a medieval, feudalistic society, at least let us make clear to those tempted to vote for Ryan and Romney what it is they will actually be voting for.
     The solution to debt, deficits and entitlement programs gone out of control is no more mysterious or unattainable that a formula for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.  As we hear time and time again, every sane person knows what the final package should look like.  This isn't about money.  There is endless talk about money, nevertheless, and most of what comes out of Republican mouths are shameless lies (lies in the defense of liberty being no vice apparently).  It remains to be seen whether or not there will just one moment in the next two months when we will hear a bald expression of what all this smoke is really about.

Is Batman a Republican?

Look, I don't know.  Maybe I am just wasting my breath.  Maybe thousands before me have written about who our childhood heros really are.  There are all those sarcastic lines out there in the culture since the 1960s belittling universities that grant advanced degrees for dissertations on comic books, so perhaps if I do a search of all those dissertations, I can relax and go on to another topic.  Maybe it's already been said.  And maybe the impulse to write about the latest Batman artifact, The Dark Knight Rises, grows out of the massacre of innocents that took place in that movie house in Colorado during a screening of the film.  This story begins with my decison to go see the movie.  I didn't go to be entertained since I don't find puerile, adolescent adventure films anything other than painfully long and boring.  I went because I wanted to see what the heck is going on out there.  By the time I had brushed off the seven-dollar popcorn crumbs, threw open the swinging doors and hit daylight, I knew I had to go into print on this one.

I thought back to the first of these Batman films that I had seen with my youngest son, then about nine years old.  Every seat in the theater was filled, mostly by kids my son's age plus or minus a few years.  Like many parents dutifully escorting a child to a de rigeur event, I enjoyed the inside jokes, the allusiveness of the set design, the campiness of a typical, post-modern cinema comic book aimed, I assumed, at the adults in the audience since most nine year-olds haven't yet gotten their liberal arts degrees.  Yet, bereft of degrees as they may be, something happened at the end of the movie that frightened me because it proved to me they had gotten the real message while I was busy deconstructing the wall paper.  Batman stands triumphant, god-like, atop a tall building while the night sky is illuminated by the projected image of the bat.  In hoc signo vinces!  No sooner did this tableau hit the screen than a guttural, visceral roar emerged from the gathered children.  Dear God, these kids had been programmed!  It was the kind of sound I associated with Hitler rallies or gatherings of some alternative quasi-religious cult.  How had this happened?

Until going to see The Dark Knight Rises, I had not seen any of the other Batman films since the 1989 version I had attended with my son. Well, it is obvious that Hollywood has been hard at work keeping up with political currents over the last almost quarter century since then.  The villain of TDKR is a Darth Vader simulacrum named Bane (a choice typical of the adolescent level of metaphor employed in the film) who is loosely patterned after a grungy Occupy Wall Street "terrorist."   I guess the semiotics of Bruce Wayne in this context would have his nearest analogue in Michael Bloomberg, our billionaire, benevolent-despot Mayor.  Actually, it would be impossible to list here all but a few of the quasi-literary allusions in TDKR, since just about everything--from the pagan chants of ersatz Carmina Burana to hokum Star Wars spiritualism and levitation--has been sunk into this production.  It appears that snickering ivy league snobs, facing diminishing job opportunities in the post 2008 world, when they aren't extending the double-speak glossary for Republican politicians in Washington, are being employed as screenwriters to mess with the minds of our children.   And this stuff is probably benign compared to what kids take in from video games and internet sites most adults (certainly this one) don't have a clue about.

If the years since Bush took office can be credited with one important contribution to our society, it is a blindingly bright transparency about who we really are.  One by one, we are being stripped of our illusions.  When the killings in Aurora took place, I am probably not alone in being reminded of H. Rap Brown's observation that "violence is as American as cherry pie."  We didn't need Bush to teach us that lesson, but the suspension of our constitutional rights and the determination to make government synonymous with evil makes it a lot harder for some of us to overlook the fact that the comic book heros of our youth were basically vigilantes, not as raw as Rambo, Travis Bickle, Dirty Harry, or Charles Bronson's forgettably named Death Wish character, but who in their colorful, seemingly wholesome, other-worldly toon dimension were just as effective in getting across to us that you really can't count on government institutions like police departments to protect you from evil.  In fact, you can't count on government for much of anything.  True salvation comes from sources above and beyond the law.

(Which is not to say that we are not also drowning in TV cops who daily struggle against increasingly evil foes, but few would accuse even the typical Jerry Burkheimer fare, the most refined expression of the genre, of eliciting rapturous roars from their audience.  Gloomy, not inspiring.  The one toon cop who made it to the screen, the venerable Dick Tracy, for all the post-modern trappings of the 1990 film, could not even generate a Dick Tracy II.  Interestingly, New York's finest are, after a considerable period of virtual entombment in TDKR, given their moment of glory in the film, but only after being released by our hero to take place in a full frontal assault on the Occupy Wall Street grunge-orists that depicts them as an army out of the period of Gladiator or Braveheart.  I guess the writers wanted to keep the men in blue on board and thought they would enjoy the scene.)

TDKR's Bane succeeds in penetrating the New York Stock Exchange in a hail of bullets.  When he has succeeded in his assault, he rises to announce that he has set the people free, put the people in power.  He even establishes a court clearly meant to elicit both visually and thematically the court of Robespierre (lines from Dickens' Tale of Two Cities to follow later in the film).  Having dispatched the evil empire, the right is now free to resume its apparently tireless attacks on the French Revolution, a revolution which did a bit more than spill some tea into Boston harbor. 

The one saving grace in all this political stew would seem to be that--given the educational achievement of most American kids--they won't get any of the references.  The danger is that the message will get through anyway.  I don't want to be around when those enraptured roars I heard back in 1989 at the end of the first Batman epic are heard not in movie houses but in our streets.

    

 

The Great Game: Part II

In a prequel to the twentieth century's Cold War shenanigans between East and West, the world witnessed a lengthy period of tension between the Russian Empire and the English Empire over control of Central Asia.  That conflict has been labeled by historians as "The Great Game."  Now that the Soviet "experiment" has collapsed, Russia appears to have reacquainted itself with its old Tsarist roots and once again taken on the trappings of empire.  Its opponent in the region is now the American rather than the British empire.  The conflict between the two empires appears far more dangerous, a far greater threat to world peace, than what now seems the cozy Cold War standoff (MAD or "Mutually Asssured Destruction") whereby the two opponents agreed not to totally annihilate the planet in a nuclear conflagration.  Of course, both empires continue to warehouse thousand of ICBMs, missiles that are still targeted on such places as Moscow and New York.
     RT.com, the Russian news outlet, is daily full of stories chronicling the growing tension between Russia and the U.S. replete with arms build-ups, CIA machinations and op-ed pieces tearing the veil from the United States' presumed preoccupation with human rights and democracy in the region.   While these stories, many of them quite lurid, have been coming out of Russia for months now, the U.S.'s major propaganda outlet, the New York Times, can go for days without drawing much attention to the crisis. 
    Many see the move to destabilize and to bring about regime change in Syria as a necessary preliminary to making a move on Iran.  As far as this game goes, we may well be approaching the endgame.  All that we have seen since the turmoil in Tunisia initiated what came to be called the Arab Spring seems to suggest that the phenomenon should more accurately be called the "Arab Springboard" to the West's ultimate goal of accomplishing its two primary foreign policy goals: the complete domination of the oil-producing world and the encirclement of our two most estimable opponents, Russia and China.

     No effort has been spared in this campaign.  If it meant abandoning old friends like Mubarak in Egypt, delivering humanitarian aid to Libya via "no-fly" zones, (actually zones in which U.S. fighter jets can bomb a nation with impunity), and initiating a sustained propaganda campaign in which Syrians armed by the U.S. were portrayed as non-violent protesters, these were small prices to pay for such lucrative rewards.
     The apparent unanimity in the West (How can one disagree when even formerly pesky France and the venerable Kofi Annan seem to be on board?) blithely flies in the face of any concept of national sovereignty or international law.  The U.S. has claimed for itself--in a psychedlic expansion of the concepts of manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine--the absolute right to install regimes compatible with its interests.
     The suspicion arises that one explanation for the appearance of unanimity among our client states is that we have held their feet to the fire, in this case the economic conflagration brought about by Nobel Prize-winning derivatives geniuses.  It is not just the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) that teeter on the edge of financial ruin.  England and France live with daily protests against the austerity measures they require to avoid bankruptcy.  At the long conference tables at which national leaders periodically gather, U.S. economists no doubt remind skeptics that half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives out there represent, to use a favored phrase, an existential threat.  We had best show a united front, circle the wagons, and be ready for the worst.  Should the Russians or the Chinese--or even nascent India--achieve parity with regard to assets like oil, the sun may set on the two-century long domination of the West.

“segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever”

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

--Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, “Getting Away with It,” New York Review of Books,”  July 12, 2012. 

Paul Krugman must be given a great deal of credit for his constant efforts in the pages of the New York Times to get policy makers to listen to reason and take the steps necessary to turn the American economy around.  For those sympathetic to his view, however, there has been frustration about his reluctance to, shall we say, name names, to allow himself to even speculate in print about why it is the Republican Party has resorted to its gridlock strategy.   Now, in a review titled “Getting Away with It,” in the current New York Review of Books, (NYR), Krugman has gone on the record.  Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, herself a respected economist and journalist, co-authored the article.  What they have together produced is a devastating indictment of Republican ideology and tactics.

As one reads their article, it becomes clear why (as they do in the first line of the excerpt above) the authors choose the euphemism “awkward” to describe the position they and their colleagues are in when it comes to candidly describing the wellsprings of  Republican strategy.  In a word, it is all about race.   Outright “dangerous” would probably be a more accurate word to describe the position one puts oneself in this country for merely suggesting that racism is a lingering cancer in America.  It must have taken considerable courage for Krugman and Wells to write this piece.  They are to be commended for it.

Ever since Barack Obama took office, right wing opposition to him and to his policies has become more and more virulent.  Such zealotry and fanaticism, such eye-rolling, hair-pulling and submission to raptures has not been seen in this country since the Civil War. Here is what I wrote in “A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power” on June 17:

The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

 The NYR piece is a review of three books:  Noam Scheiber’s The Escape Artists, (“an inside account of Obama’s economic team from the early days of the presidential transition to late 2011”), Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire (in which Frank describes the current crisis as “something unique in the history of American social movements: a mass conversion to free-market theory as a response to hard times.”), and Thomas Byrne Edsall’s The Age of Austerity.   It is Edsall’s thesis, namely that the divisions we are seeing are a consequence of scarcity, that finally prompts Krugman and Wells to retort that:

    The truth is that the austerity Edsall emphasizes is more the result than the cause of our embittered politics. We have a depressed economy in large part because Republicans have blocked almost every Obama initiative designed to create jobs, even refusing to confirm Obama nominees to the board of the Federal Reserve. (MIT’s Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate, was rejected as lacking sufficient qualifications.) We have a huge battle over deficits, not because deficits actually pose an immediate problem, but because conservatives have found deficit hysteria a useful way to attack social programs.

So where does the embittered politics come from? Edsall himself supplies much of the answer. Namely, what he portrays is a Republican Party that has been radicalized not by a struggle over resources—tax rates on the wealthy are lower than they have been in generations—but by fear of losing its political grip as the nation changes. The most striking part of The Age of Austerity, at least as we read it, was the chapter misleadingly titled “The Economics of Immigration.” The chapter doesn’t actually say much about the economics of immigration; what it does, instead, is document the extent to which immigrants and their children are, literally, changing the face of the American electorate.

As Edsall concedes, this changing face of the electorate has had the effect of radicalizing the GOP. “For whites with a conservative bent,” he writes—and isn’t that the very definition of the Republican base?—the shift to a majority-minority nation [i.e., a nation in which minorities will make up the majority] will strengthen the already widely held view that programs benefiting the poor are transferring their taxpayer dollars to minority recipients, from first whites to blacks and now to “browns.”

And that’s the message of Rick Santelli’s rant, right there.

      This is, of course, by no means the first time that undercurrents—or, more often, outright paroxysms of racial conflict have changed the political landscape of the United States.  The Civil War dealt the Confederacy a crushing blow, but it changed few hearts and minds in the South.  The rights and freedoms given the former slaves after the war through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments (the so-called “Reconstruction Amendments”) vanished as soon as the U.S. army of occupation left the South.  As late as 1963, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation,  George Wallace could still make the blood of Alabamans boil when he talked about the “infamous, illegal fourteenth amendment. (The great state of Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1995.)  A rigged presidential election in 1876 put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House, ended Reconstruction and initiated a century-long reign of terror imposed on Black Americans—replete with Klan robes, lynchings, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws.   Even now, in the twenty-first century, many of the gains and accomplishments made by Black Americans during Reconstruction have not seen their equal.  In 1963, just a few months prior to Martin  Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream speech” on the steps of the Lincoln monument, the good citizens of Alabama greeted George Wallace’s inaugural speech proclamation, “segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever” with enthusiastic applause.

     Wallace's inaugural address is well worth reading in its entirety.  Nearly half a century later, it may be read essentially as the philosophy and program of the 21st- century Republican Party.  The so-called Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and '70s was in effect a second Civil War.  It is easy for many Americans to forget that it was only the use of Federal troops in the South that finally forced change.  There is little reflection either on the hundreds of American cities that had erupted into insurrection during that period, with tanks rolling down American streets a common occurrence.  But just as the South responded to the Civil War and Reconstruction through terror, there would be push-back to the reaffirmation of our laws that was accomplished through the Civil Rights Act.  Wallace had issued the call:

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest (sic) reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

     It would take until 1980 for the reorganized forces of Southern reaction to finally have their way.  Wallace's call to like-minded citizens outside of the South would finally be realized.   Following the Civil Rights Act, the South abandoned the Democratic Party and became solidly Republican.   The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a fundamental redrawing of the political map.  Barack Obama is not only the first Black president, he is the first Northerner to take the White House since John F. Kennedy.  With the exception of Gerald Ford, an accidental president, Sun belt and Bible belt have dominated now for half a century.  Southern politicians stashed their white suits and Panama hats and went to Brooks Brothers for their pin-stripes while the Northern white working class--frightened, frustrated, often forced out of their homes through block-busting--cleaved to Ronald Reagan as their savior, abandoning the Democratic Party wholesale.  The premium placed on suburbanization and the assault on unions would permanently alter the character of the Democratic Party.

     There are those on the left who demur from laying the blame for what has happened in this country to race, insisting that it is all about class.  While they proceed to split hairs, the end result has been that few if any Americans will frankly confront the cancer that has festered in our nation since its inception.  Some may feel, (including our Black president), that the issue is too volatile, a skeleton best left in the closet.  Better to be polite and hope that reason will prevail.  Even our Black citizens are wary--and this in spite of the fact that they have suffered more than any other Americans through the recent crisis.  One analyst stated that it would take 500 years for Black America to regain the wealth that it lost after 2008.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

Readers of Thatched Cottage may recall that in my blog of March 13th of this year, titled "Our Amorphous Constitutional Protections," I reproduced the picture below, obviously created by another American citizen who fears that we may soon be running, as Cary Grant did in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, from predator drones.  I will confess to being shocked to find that President Obama, who ran promising a change from the Bush administration, has already signed on to fill the American skies with military drones.  I reproduce here the full text of the article which presently appears on the World Socialist web site (wsws.org).   I cannot recall seeing the story in the New York Times for some reason.
     In a way, this is nothing new.  A PBS documentary on the Cold War (now apparently deeply shelved beyond reach in its archives) once showed how the U.S. spent billions of dollars to monitor Soviet submarines in the Pacific Ocean by covering basically every inch of the planet's largest body of water with radar buoys.  It then went to the expense of training hundreds of surveillance workers to just stare at radar screens twenty-four hours a day.  Military experts at the time bragged that, while at first monitors had trouble distinguishing between dolphins and submarines, they soon could spot not only nuclear subs but distinguish between ocean species.  I can only assume that the program is still in place and that we are still paying for it.  It seems that there is endless money to spend on projects such as these, very little for meeting social needs.  Many believe that the USSR collapsed because they just couldn't keep up with our military expenditures and wasted too much their resources in the effort.  Ironically, the US may meet a similar fate fighting enemies imagined and domestic, let alone the real bad guys.









Thousands of military drones to be deployed over US mainland

By Tom Carter
18 June 2012

A recent Department of Defense report to Congress as well as a number of media investigations have exposed government plans to deploy tens of thousands of drones over the US mainland in the coming years.

Predator drone firing hellfire missile

An investigative report published over the weekend by the Christian Science Monitor cited the government’s own estimates that “as many as 30,000 drones could be part of intelligence gathering and law enforcement here in the United States within the next ten years.”

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as “drones,” are extremely sophisticated remotely-operated aircraft, developed and manufactured by the military-industrial complex in recent years at a cost of billions of dollars.

Drones vary in size from the four-pound RQ-11B Raven surveillance drone, which can be launched by hand, to the giant MQ-9 Reaper combat drone, manufactured by Northrup Grumman. The Reaper has a maximum take-off weight of 7,000 pounds, including up to 3,000 pounds of bombs, missiles and other armaments.

The infamous MQ-1 Predator drone, armed with 100-pound Hellfire missiles, is the Obama administration’s favored weapon in its illegal assassination program. A Predator drone was used in the unprecedented assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen last September.

With a push of a button, thousands of pounds of high explosives can be dropped on anyone, anywhere in the world, with startling precision. Safe behind video screens at military bases within the US, military drone operators refer to their victims as “bug splats.” Thousands of innocent civilians have already been murdered in this way in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Current and projected drone bases in the US [Source: US Air Force]

An April Department of Defense report, titled “Future Unmanned Aircraft Systems Training, Operations, and Sustainability,” reveals that a massive drone infrastructure is already being erected within the US, with billions of dollars being allocated, bases being erected, thousands of pilots and crews being trained, and inventories being stockpiled.

The report identifies 110 military bases that will serve as drone launch sites. The deadly Predator and Reaper drones will operate out of Creech Air Force Base (AFB) in Nevada, Holloman AFB and Cannon AFB in New Mexico, Fort Drum in New York, Grand Forks in North Dakota, Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, Whiteman AFB in Missouri, and the Southern California Logistics Airport, among others.

The accompanying map, from an Air Force power-point presentation released this month, shows current and projected locations for drone bases within the US.

The Department of Defense report argues for lifting the current framework of restrictions on drone flights over the US on the grounds that it “does not provide the level of airspace access necessary to accomplish the wide range of DoD UAS missions at current and projected operational tempos (OPTEMPOs).”

The language of the report is revealing and ominous. “This constraint will only be exacerbated as combat operations shift from abroad and systems return to US locations,” the report states. It expressly refers to plans to “conduct continental United States (CONUS)-based missions.”

In January, Congress passed HR 658, which requires the Federal Aviation Administration to take steps to facilitate the integration of drones “into the national airspace system.” President Obama signed the bill on February 14 with no public discussion or comment. (See “Drones come to the US”)

Since Obama signed the bill, hundreds of drones have already begun flying over the US to spy on and monitor the population. A recent ABC News investigative report entitled “UAVs: Will Our Civil Liberties Be Droned Out?” outlined the possibility of drones buzzing overhead becoming “a fact of daily life.”

ABC News reported: “Drones can carry facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, thermal imaging cameras, open WiFi sniffers, and other sensors. And they can be armed.”

“Among the most eager to fly domestic drones are America’s police departments,” the report stated. “In Texas, a Montgomery county sheriff’s office recently said it would deploy a drone bought with money from a Department of Homeland Security grant and was contemplating arming the drone with non-lethal weapons like tear gas, rubber bullets or Taser-style rounds.”

The ABC News report identified “political protests” as one of the activities that can be monitored by drones.

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union published a detailed report on the dangers of a massive build-up of surveillance drones within the US, warning that “our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, described last month a “nightmare scenario” of widespread drone spying leading “to an oppressive atmosphere where people learn to think twice about everything they do, knowing that it will be recorded, charted, scrutinized by increasingly intelligent computers, and possibly used to target them.”

According to a Los Angeles Times article in December of last year, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are already using Predator drones for operations within the US. Last week, a huge Global Hawk drone being operated by the US Navy for an unknown purpose crashed in Maryland.

The deployment of tens of thousands of surveillance drones over the mainland US takes on special significance in light of recent revelations that the Obama administration is secretly constructing “bottomless” databases to house information gathered about US citizens. (See “Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans”)

The build-up of drone bases within the US is one component of preparations by the US government for a confrontation with its own population. Like everything else associated with the so-called “war on terror”—including torture, detention without trial, warrantless spying, assassinations, military tribunals, and expanded executive and intelligence powers—the use of drones for spying and assassination in the Middle East is a prelude to the development of systems that will ultimately be used against the American people in the event of social upheavals.

On “Terror Tuesdays” at the White House, President Obama helps draw up a list of opponents of US policy overseas who are to be illegally assassinated by drone-fired missiles. These “kill lists” have already included US citizens. With tens of thousands of drones flying overhead, and with the US mainland designated as a “battleground” in the never-ending and geographically unlimited “war on terror,” the US ruling class hopes one day soon to be able to eliminate its domestic opponents with similar ease.

A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power

Call me a masochist, but I have spent considerable time watching C-Span's coverage of the seemingly countless right wing events and rallies designed to electrify the right wing base in anticipation of the next elections.  If I did not have an innocent's basic trust of C-Span as an institution, I might conclude that they are intentionally drowning us in right wing propaganda.  It seems the right wing gets a lot more time.  I choose rather to conclude that C-Span is actually doing us a service by taking us into the belly of the right wing beast and letting us in on what they are really like, particularly when they are among friends and taking on the role of cheerleaders for the cause.     Newt Gingrich has the gift of being able to impersonate a rational human being.  He has assimilated some of the mannerisms of the liberal establishment only so that he can effectively turn those very mannerisms against their source.  In one recent speech, he stated that the 2012 election will be "the most important election since the election of 1860."  He did not elaborate, but given the tenor of his speech, one can speculate.  The election of 1860 gave us Abraham Lincoln and precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter.  I wonder, does Newt think the country would have been better off if Lincoln had lost?  It is worthwhile to revisit the 1860 election, in which, as it turned out, Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, the remainder being divided between the Southern candidates, Breckinridge and Bell and Douglas, the Illinois Democrat.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860)

     There has been the growing sense, for a long time, but particularly since the election of our first Black president, that the right smells an opportunity not merely to roll back American history to the time before the New Deal, but to the time before the Civil War and Reconstruction.  (In the case of George Bush, we even seemed in danger of going back to a period before the Magna Carta of 1215 which established that the "law of the land" trumped the whims of the monarch. Aspects of Bush's magisterial overreach sadly linger in the Obama administration.)

     The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

      The right wing tantrum that we are currently being treated to goes largely without a response from whatever you want to call the vestigial "left" in this country.   Obama is portrayed as the anti-Christ, a foreigner, a socialist, anti-religion, anti-freedom.  Large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to put the right wing hate campaign in any perspective.  Many are poorly educated thanks to the decades long campaign against education in this country.  Even the minority who read anything are constantly being told that the mainstream media is controlled by the left (a laughable notion given who owns media in this country) and therefore not to be trusted.  Thus the cosmically disingenuous criticisms of Obama for not making more progress on the economy or giving us a health plan we could all greet with enthusiasm when lack of progress is the direct result of the Republican Party's brazenly announced strategy of gridlock.  The half a quadrillion in dervivatives still floating in the financial ether that were the result of amazing corporate greed made possible by shooting down all sane regulation are ignored.
      What had always been an undercurrent in our history, obvious even in the compromises which gave us our constitution, that is, the fear that democacy was equal to mob rule, has now become an overarching theme.  Undercurrents and once-thought-of as relatively innocuous palliatives such as agnostic Ike inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance have been reborn as mainstream thought.  History is daily being rewritten and carved into stone.   Even elementary school students were once taught, for example, that the founding fathers, children of the Englightenment, had been deists rather than members of any Protestant sect.  Now, however, Thomas Jefferson, a man as likely to believe in the divinity of Jesus as he might the tooth fairy, is being reconstrued as a devout Christian.  The combination of religious zealotry and its accompanying tendency to find science deeply suspect is responsible for the wholesale rewriting of our textbooks to ensure that future generations of American children will be able to envision Jefferson as a church-goer and dinosaur bones as bogus artifacts planted by left wing conspirators.  Aiding in this effort is the emergence of countless right wing "think tanks" having constant seminars with all the trappings of orthodox academia--the blue back drops with neatly printed logos, Q and A's with three questions at a time being taken from the floor, the right mix of old line WASP "hands" and neo-liberal cabalists.
     The current occupant of the White House has revealed himself to be not quite the "change" millions of Americans who have not yet drunk from the poisoned well had hoped for.  It would not be too extreme to state baldly that many feel duped by the 2008 election.  Election results in 2010 and in Massachusetts and the recent failed recall in Wisconsin are other disturbing possible harbingers of what can occur when large numbers of voters feel they were betrayed.  And the current Republican candidate seems relatively innocuous compare to, let's say, a Gingrich, a Santorum or a Palin.  But if the Republicans take the White House in November, the lunatic fringe in this country will go on a rampage.
      

Scott Walker and the Union Movement

While it would not be an exaggeration to say that I am heartbroken over the outcome of the move to replace Wisconsin's Scott Walker, it did serve the purpose of prompting me to consider why a majority of voters find him (and his like in other venues, such as Chris Christie and Paul Ryan), an acceptable leader.   How do we explain, progressives can often be heard to ask, why it is that large numbers--increasingly a majority--of Americans vote against their own interests? Those on the left do much head-scratching over why, in the heat of a financial crisis visited upon us by billionaire hedge fund managers, the average American expresses far more anger toward the guy down the block who happens to belong to a union.  Some write off this tendency as mere jealousy.  Your neighbor with a union card is a far more convenient target of opportunity than the one percent of his fellow Americans hidden from view in their gated, country club communities.  In fact, given the prevailing values of capitalist America, the one percent are actually respected and admired, just one lottery ticket away from being the neighbors you really deserve.  While those who occupy Zucotti Park are depicted as a lot of grungy malcontents in the financial district, the one percent are the true occupiers of Wall Street, a capitalist Valhalla synonymous with what was once called the Great American Dream.  The forty-eight percent of us who are either dismayed by or contemptuous of this attitude, however, may want to reflect on one significant reason the divide among us developed.
     Ultimately, the thread that runs through not merely the success of opportunistic demagogues on the right but also the Tea Party phenomenon and the general drift to the right in this country reveals the deep and lingering effects of a once fiercely debated issue in the American union movement, namely, the tendency to create what was called an "aristocracy of labor."  It is a dichotomy as old as the battles that once took place between the A.F. of L. and the C.I.O.  It helps to explain how during the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, teachers, rather than corporate felons, became public enemy number one.
    It is often pointed out that union membership in this country, once at 40% of the work force, has declined to the 12% or so who continue hold union cards.  Changes in the global economy, outsourcing, the nation's post-1960s social battles and the fact that unions were never exactly popular, have all contributed to this outcome, but the inherent conflicts in the history of the union movement have also played a large role. 
     Needless to say, throughout our history, the owners of American business did their best to block unions from forming in the first place and, where that failed, resorted to subverting or pacifying them the best they could.  Union organizers were characterized as communists, un-American, but because the union movement became an inexorable force growing out of the desperate economic conditions of the early twentieth century, it was seen as an evil better to tolerate than invite more dire alternatives.  This is not to say that the truce that came to exist between the big unions and goverment was not hard won.  Incidents of striking workers being clubbed, shot down or even massacred riddle our history.   If unions were never popular, the main culprit was obviously the unrelenting campaign against them spear-headed by business interests.  It is nevertheless important to understand that, for millions of workers, the unions were themselves the problem. 

     The popular 1950s film, On the Waterfront, with Marlon Brando portraying the brother of a thug connected to a corrupt longshoreman's union, might serve as an icon of unionism's divided identity.  From the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa to the United Federation of Teachers' Al Shanker, a variety of union leadership evolved that often placed democratic unionists in opposition to their own leadership.  Many union organizers in the 1930s were in fact communists, but by the 1950s and early 1960s, HUAC, McCarthyism and the cold war had forced most radicals out of the movement.  This, of course, did not prevent anti-union interests from continuing to caricature unions as subversive and anti-American.  But the philosophical differences between the school of thought personified by Samuel Gompers, who put a premium on skilled workers, and the opposing view personified by the leadership of the C.I.O., that sought to include all workers, took a toll on the movement as a whole.
     We now have automotive plants and other industries relocating to the South where business need not worry about pesky unions and thus the cost of wages and benefits are minimized.  There was a time when this would have caused great conflict among workers, but now, they see themselves fortunate to just have a job; there is a Chinese boy or girl they are told, who will be happy to do your job for a small fraction of the hourly wage you demand. As a result, the union movement has become essentially moribund.
     Ever since Ronald Reagan destroyed the Air Traffic Controllers' union, there has been an inexorable campaign to entirely expunge an already hobbled union movement from this country.  Unions became a target of opportunity for the right wing, and they have taken full advantage of the historical moment.  Milton Friedman had a virulent hatred of teachers' unions and the full panoply of supposed "reforms", (Cf. Walker's use of this term, the right wing euphemism for rolling back any and all advances since the New Deal), such as charter schools, merit pay, elimination of tenure or, at its most extreme manifestation, as we have seen in Wisconsin, the elimination of collective bargaining for public employees' unions.
    So, yes, my fellow forty-eight percenters, there are good reasons why so many American voters seem to be voting against their own interests.  If the problem of educating working class Americans to who their real enemy is was difficult before the conservative counter-revolution, it has become far more difficult now.  If we really care, we will stop scratching our heads, and get out there and, yes, organize.  It won't happen by itself.

Public Employees' Unions

As most New Yorkers of a certain age can recall, there's a line in Woody Allen's 1973 film, Sleeper, a comic look at a post-WWIII future, in which the character he portrays explains what happened with the line, "a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead."  It is ironic that the man who, in the early 1960s, saw it as his mission to wrest control of the teachers' union from radical leftists came to rule with an iron hand over the largest and one of the most fearsome union locals in the A.F. of L. -C.I.O.  Actually, a law known as the Feinberg Law had done most of Shanker's work for him.  In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the law, which was designed to prohibit communists from teaching in the New York City public schools, with dissenting justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter asserting that the decision ""turns the school system into a spying project." (Cf. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/supreme-court-rules-on-communist-teachers).   What likely prompted Woody Allen to pen his famous line, however, was Shanker's role in the 1968 teachers' strike, a strike that closed the New York City schools for three months and left scars that are still in evidence over forty years later.  
      One aftermath of that strike which might be considered a foreshock of Scott Walker's recent success at prohibiting teachers to participate in collective bargaining, was New York State's Taylor Law, which deprived teachers of a far more pungent right for unions--the right to strike.  (In another ironic footnote to these events, the single deciding vote for the law in the New York legislature was cast by a school teacher, Conservative Party member, Vincent Riccio.)  Without the right to strike or the right to collective bargaining, a union is no longer a union, it is at best a loosely organized professional organization.
     Shanker had always done his best to rein in the left of his organization.  The union's Delegate Assembly, which at one time had sent delegates in numbers proportional to the total on a school's staff, was reduced to two delegates per school when the DA proved too unwieldy by overriding  Shanker's opposition to its vote to have the union go on the record as opposed to the war in Vietnam.  The term of office for chapter leaders was lengthened, and, when thousands of teachers opposed the 1968 strike, the union's leadership was purged of dissidents.  Over 8,000 teachers were allowed to be "excessed," many of whom had also dissented from the union's tactics in dealing with the issue of community control.  So much for democratic unionism.  Even in a rank and file that consists of teachers, never a particularly radical bunch, after 1968 the UFT was effectively contolled by Shanker and his hand-picked loyalists who vigilantly guarded against the slightest manifestation of radicalism.  To the handful who knew Shanker's history, his affiliation with the virulently anti-communist Max Schactman socialists and his USIA connections, none of this came as a surprise.  The only militant unionists Shanker ever supported were the members of Lech Walesa's Polish Solidarity (Solidarnoc) who contributed to the end of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe.   In 1998, Shanker was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Clinton.
     The history of the United Federation of Teachers parallels the history of many unions in this country.  There is only one reason that public service employees' unions (PSEUs)continue to exist: it is not quite so easy to outsource police, teachers and fire fighters.   If they could, you can be sure, they would, especially in an era that has seen prisons and even the armed forces placed increasingly in private hands.  Though difficult to eliminate, there have been ceaseless efforts to tame the PSEUs.  Much of what gets in the media about the outrageous benefits enjoyed by the PSEUs is not only horror stories, it is just plain false.  In the UFT here in New York, for example, the city has just announced the introduction of Tier 6, the effect of which will be to see benefits gradually decline to a fraction of what the few remaining dinosaurs who entered the system fifty years ago are currently entitled to.   The work of rolling back wages and benefits has largely been done.  For the right, the only remaining task is to break the unions entirely.  It is no longer enough to use the older strategy of planting the seeds of self-destruction by ensuring that Medal of Freedom winners kept militants in check.  
  

Finally, a Tiny Fissure in the Wall of Lies

As far as most Americans can tell, world opinion is, with the single exception of Russia, otherwise unanimous on the subject of conditions in Syria.  President Hassad must go.   For listeners of National Public Radio's Sunday morning show, On the Media, however, a small fissure in the wall of lies we have been treated to managed to erupt.   (I would refer readers who wish a full account to the NPR web site where a full audiocast of the interview with Lauren Wolf of the Women Under Siege Project may be heard.)   Ms. Wolf's work with the project led her to probe more deeply into accusations made by Senator Joe Lieberman, (Israel's ambassador to the U.S. Senate), that members of the Syrian Army were raping large numbers of Syrian women.   Asked what had sent up a "red flag," Ms. Wolf stated that she began to see a pattern in the reports; they seemed remarkably similar, as if they might be coming out of a propaganda ministry rather than unbiased reports.  It seemed, she said, that "they only want us to be ctiticizing the Syrian army."   Recounting how false reports led us into the disatrous war with Iraq, she felt an obligation to verify the charges made by Senator Lieberman.  It so happened that the NPR broadcast coincided with the New York Times report on President Hassad's speech to his parliament.  Although it seems almost dangerous to commit this thought to print in the climate that prevails in this country, I find that Hassad's representation of the treatment his regime is receiving from the American-led campaign against him is essentially accurate:

"...some people went as far as denying the existence of the foreign factor altogether and considered this argument an escape from internal obligations. They argued that the gist of the problem a disagreement between Syrian parties and that what is happening on the ground is a purely peaceful movement and that the source of any violence is the state. Some people made this argument in malice and bad faith and others made it with naivety, lack of knowledge, and as a result of media  forgeries. Now, and after more than a year from the beginning of these events, things are clearer and masks have been lifted. The international role in what is happening is already well-known not only for decades, but for centuries past. And I don't think it's going to change in the foreseeable future. Colonialism is still colonialism. It only changed in terms of methods and ways of  attack."                                                            
    On the subject of whether or not anti-government activities have taken the form of peaceful protests, the Western press seems unconcerned about contradicting itself almost daily.  While on the one hand having presented a scenario in which innocent protesters have been massacred by the Syrian army, it concurrently publishes numerous reports of the U.S. and its allies arming the "resistance," and of armed conflict occurring in many of Syria's population centers.  There are frequent threats of a military intervention similar to that Nato (the U.S.) employed in Libya.  Even the French, only recently seen as bad boys unwilling to join the "coalition of the willing,"  have threatened military intervention.  Someone finally succeeded in placing a pod beneath France's bed, it seems.  It is obvious that the U.S. has persuaded its allies that it will tolerate nothing less than unanimity next time around.
     Of course, anyone who focuses on the contradictory pronouncements made by those who are clearly seeking "regime change" in Syria is placed in the position of appearing to defend dictatorship over democracy.  One need not, however, be exactly an admirer of Assad to be appalled by the gross intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.  The late Bush administration's brazen broadcasting in its official statement of U.S. foreign policy its self-appointed right to pre-emptively attack any and all of its perceived enemies without regard for sovereignty only brought into the light of day a policy which the U.S. has long followed somewhat more covertly.
     Even so, not since the era of Yellow Journalism has there been more unbridled saber rattling than over Syria.  The campaign to pacify and bring under the U.S.-Israeli "peace umbrella" the swath of Muslim nations that stretches from Tunisia to China, coyly labeled the Arab Spring, has for now, beyond its ultimate goal of a Pax Americana for the entire globe, the shorter term goal of isolating and conquering Iran, seen as the major obstacle to the U.S.'s plan.

The Chart

Okay, let's take a look at this chart:

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

 

 

First of all, take a careful look at those countries that are ranked higher than the U.S.  They are among the most racially homogeneous societies in the world.  Many of them plan on staying that way, with little immigration, the imposition of bars against acquiring citizenship, and, in some cases, outright xenophobia.  Going down the list, we find a predominance of nations like Finland, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Slovak Republic, Norway, Luxembourg.  Most of these are nations that are small in population as well as tending to be homogeneous in nature, and, dare we say it, extremely white.  So white, in fact, that for this observer at least, they elicit thoughts of claims of Nordic and Teutonic superiority which, since the Nazis gave eugenics a bad name a little while back, are no longer uttered in polite company.
     Outside of Northern Europe (with the exception of those darned socialist French), other locations given high rankings tend to be either in Asia or such outposts of the old British Empire as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Note, too, that with regard to Asia, such island provinces as Hong Kong and Macao appear.  Since 2003, of course, as the "economic tigers" have allocated more and more of their resources to improving education, other Asian locales have joined the higher rankings.
    
Have standards declined in U.S. public schools?  Well, that depends a great deal on which public schools we are looking at, doesn't it?  If we are looking at the public schools in Scarsdale, let's say, we will get a very different picture than we will if we look at public schools in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant or East New York.  Has anyone thought to, just out of curiosity, compare the results of kids in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor with those of kids in Finland? There are no doubt many who look at the rankings and mindlessly conclude that what we are seeing is clear evidence of the racial superiority of whites and Asians.  If school performance were just about race, however, we might expect that whites performed uniformly well on standardized tests.  What one actually finds is that there is a wide spread between the performance of white students that is largely dependent on income.  In other words, some are more equal than others.  To cite just one example from a voluminous literature on this subject, take a look at the observations of one school administrator in Westchester:

The three top-spending districts (on a gross basis)—Briarcliff ($24,738), North Salem ($24,486), and Bronxville ($24,068)—each spend approximately $10,000 more per pupil than Yonkers ($14,170), Port Chester ($14,461), and Mount Vernon ($14,955). The disparity between instructional expenditures is even more profound. Although they serve roughly the same size student populations, Rye ($12,531) spends about 50 percent more on per-pupil instruction than Port Chester ($8,299). “I can’t compete on a per-capita spending level,” says Charles Coletti, school superintendent of Port Chester. “Financial comparisons don’t work for my district. They never have, and they never will.**

**http://www.westchestermagazine.com/Westchester-Magazine/March-2006/Our-Smartest-Public-High-School-Report-Card/

None of us is immune to the tsk-tsking about declining standards.  There was never a time in history when the observation was not made that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, to coin a phrase.  There are probably very few of us who have not drawn dark conclusions from charts such as the one presented here.  On the other hand, while it is certainly fair to conclude that certain standards (my favorite is handwriting) have declined, if we don't keep in mind that statistics often lie and deceive, we will become party to a campaign that, rather than being motivated by a desire to improve American education is actually motivated to dismantle our public school system.  If anything, what the charts have to teach us is that funding for American schools should be standardized.  That is the real way to ensure that no child is left behind.

The Right Wing Campaign Against Public Education

First, let's look at a typical report on the relative success among a select group of nations with regard to student performance in mathematics.  (Although the scores go back to 2003, later assessments show basically the same results.  Since results in reading and science are comparable, in the interest of brevity and for the purpose of this post, math results will suffice.)

International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds

More than 250,000 15-year old students from 41 countries participated in the assessment. The countries included all major industrialized nations (results for Britain were not available) and 11 other nations that chose to participate. The test scores are from 2003.

Mean Performance on Mathematics Scale

	Range of ranks1
Country	Upper rank2	Lower rank3
Hong Kong (China)	1	3
Finland	1	4
South Korea	1	5
Netherlands	2	7
Liechtenstein	2	9
Japan	3	10
Canada	5	9
Belgium	5	10
Macao (China)	6	12
Switzerland	6	12
Australia	9	12
New Zealand	9	13
Czech Republic	12	17
Iceland	13	16
Denmark	13	17
France	14	18
Sweden	15	19
Austria	16	20
Germany	17	21
Ireland	17	21
Slovak Republic	19	24
Norway	21	24
Luxembourg	22	24
Poland	22	26
Hungary	22	27
Spain	25	28
Latvia	25	28
United States	25	28
Russian Federation	29	31
Portugal	29	31
Italy	29	31
Greece	32	33
Serbia	32	34
Turkey	33	36
Uruguay	34	36
Thailand	34	36
Mexico	37	37
Indonesia	38	40
Tunisia	38	40
Brazil	38	40

1. Because data are based on samples, it is not possible to report exact rank order positions for countries. However, it is possible to report the range of rank order positions within which the country mean lies with 95% likelihood.

2. Rank based on top two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

3. Rank based on lowest two levels of proficiency (out of six) on mean scale of mathematical performance.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD PISA (Program for Student Assessment) 2003 database

Read more: International Comparison of Math, Reading, and Science Skills Among 15-Year-Olds — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html#ixzz1vlE0xEI4

Web site:  http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923110.html
______________________

We've all seen this or similar charts.  We have in fact been bombarded with such statistics, the publication and announcement of which is inevitably accompanied by hand wringing, hair pulling and keening over the terrible condition of U.S. schools.  "Why," the rhetoric goes, "is the most powerful nation in the world faring so badly?"   Before analyzing the chart above, let us keep in mind that two prominent figures emerged in recent years to spearhead the attack on public education in this country--Milton Friedman and Michelle Rhee.  Along with numerous other true believers, they became the poster children for an attack which, as we shall see, has been only tangentially, if at all, focused on what ails our schools but very interested in destroying the remnants of a once powerful union movement in the United states.  Thus Friedman and Rhee's answer to the puzzle is that what is wrong with the schools are the teachers.  It is hard to tell whether the better literary reference here is to George Orwell or Lewis Carroll, but forced to come up with an explanation for the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression after thirty years of having its way with the American economy, the right wing would point to the chart above and say, "None of this would have happened had it not been for the teachers (or, more to the point, the fact that teachers are unionized and actually have [defined benefit!] pensions)."  Why is the U.S. ranked between Latvia and Russia in the above rankings?  Because those benighted teachers have been leaning on their shovels, collecting enormous pensions and moreover setting a terrible example for working class Americans who, dating back to Ronald Reagan's busting of the Air Traffic Controllers Union, been gradually deprived of their unions and such outrageous benefits as health plans and pensions.  No hedge fund and derivatives traders have been tried in our courts after bankrupting the world economy, but in the court of public opinion, teachers are now Public Enemy No. 1 (although they may be in a narrow tie for that distinction with irresponsible Black men and women who were bilked out of their savings by being lured into "no-doc" mortgages in an attempt to find adequate housing).   From New Jersey's Governor Christie to Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker, across the nation, the cry has gone out, "Get those damned teachers!"

Friedman, coming out of the Rockefeller haunt at the University of Chicago, breeding ground for the group of economists who wished to lobotomize the U.S. in an effort to make them forget the New Deal and embrace nineteenth century laissez-faire economics as well as the so-called neo-liberal cabal that sees as its mission the making of a world safe for the U.S. and Israel, went to his deathbed bemoaning the fact that, try as he could, he had failed to destroy teachers' unions and privatize American schools.

Michelle Rhee, a Korean-American capitalizing on the perception that Asian culture has some magic potion* they feed to their kids to make them excel in school, proceeded to institute a reign of terror in the Washington, D.C. school system for teachers she characterized as poor performers. Ms. Rhee, catching the scent of a career opportunity, has gone on to recreate herself as a guru for the whole litany of right wing prescriptions for reinventing education in America--vouchers, charter schools, teaching to the test, merit pay, doing away with tenure, and so on.  It is a prescription for basically complete privatization and the utilization of techniques in schools taken from the pages of the kind of corporate manuals that make chicken farming so attractive a sector of the growing unregulated, non-union U.S. economy. 
     *(After all, statistics do not lie. The student population at New York's Stuyvesant High School, probably the toughest ticket for admission to an elite public school in the nation, is now 75% Asian. And no one is readier to believe in the genetic intellectual superiority of Asians than these kids. If anyone needs further examples of Asian superiority, take a look at enrollment figures at MIT or a host of other prestigious U.S. schools.  Few Americans truly understand the Asian "secret."  Having visited many schools throughout Asia, I can testify to the fact that their superior results have almost nothing to do with the quality of their teachers or even the educational material in their schools, both of which suffer by comparison with the best that the U.S. has to offer.  It has a lot to do with family pride and face and far more days and hours spent in school supplemented by countless prep academies given the job of sharpening skills and getting their students into the best high schools, colleges and universities.  Few if any U.S. children would tolerate the regimen imposed on kids throughout Asia.)

Historically, over the latter half of the twentieth century, no group was more critical of the short-comings of American education than the left.  Their critique, however, centered not on the failings of teachers but rather on the failings of a system that had basically turned its back on the millions of black and brown and poor kids who, in many of the nation's cities, left behind in the dust of white flight to the suburbs, were relegated to schools that were grossly underfunded to meet their needs.  In fact, many of the most severe critics of urban public schools were the very teachers working within them.  This often proved to be so much the case, that conservative union leaders like the late Al Shanker, (as well as his hand-picked successors), had to take on the usual role of an American labor leader, that of gatekeeper, doing his best to tamp down the "radicals" within his rank and file.  Like so many other American movements, the movement within the unions to take a more aggressive stance in behalf of their young charges ran into a wall in 1968.  That was the year a three-month long teachers' strike grew out of another Rockefeller inspiration.  Former JFK cabinet member, McGeorge Bundy, (ever alert to opportunities for pacification programs) and his Ford Foundation issued a report on Community Control of the Schools.  What was a barely disguised effort to entrench segregation in Northern schools was seen as an opportunity for the ambitious within many of the target communities and an excuse to purge white teachers among the many already employed as teachers in those communities.  The schools, race relations, teachers' unions, the public image of school teachers and lot more would never be the same after that long and ugly strike.

And, in an effort to give a full picture, some time should be taken to address one other player in the great school debate as we have seen it play out over the last fifty years.  In effect transcending the differences between right wing and left wing critiques of our schools, this third group devoted itself to pointing out to an innocent American public that, wholesome as their faith in the power of education might be, it was, at bottom irrelevant as a determinant for success or even social mobility.  What mattered far more was class.*  This, of course, is the nasty little secret hidden under the cover of the Norman Rockwell quilt stitched on the Great American Dream Machine.  The implications of this school of thought are enormous.  If true, then spending more money on what were once called "ghetto schools" was just throwing good money after bad.  Judged by cold statistics, all of those bleeding hearts (another popular phrase of the period) were just wasting their time.

     *(No surprise, Christopher Jencks, the leading proponent of this analysis, was a product of Exeter, Harvard and the London School of Economics.  He was, and still is, a leading figure among that group of intellectuals given the assignment of responding to left wing (Marxist) analyses.  Doling out such assignments to truly loyal Americans is one of the major roles of our elite universities, often with considerable help from such governmental organizations as you can probably imagine and need not be listed here.) 

     To some extent, this argument had some weight for both right and left wing educational critics.  Certainly the left, schooled in the literature of class warfare, had to admit that there was some merit to this viewpoint.  It seemed a rather depressing and demoralizing turn in the pedagogical literature--unless all that was being offered was an academic version of "the poor shall always be with us."   The only problem was that no one seemed prepared to put the theory to the ultimate test by actually funding schools for poor kids at the same level their brother and sister American kids enjoyed in Scarsdale or Chevy Chase or Ann Arbor. 

Next: A Close Look at The Chart