Jajuna

This is from today’s New York Times. Conservative education scholar and former Bush I assistant secretary of education, Diane Ravitch, has performed an about face on neoliberal school reform. Along with such neocon market fundamentalists like Chester Finn, Newt Gingrich, and others, Ravitch has been a champion of corporate school privatization, high stakes testing, and union busting. That is until recently. In a new book, Ravitch has discovered that these kinds of policies are not only poisonous for schools but for the health and promotion of a substantive democratic culture and polity. In the past, I have not found myself in agreement with Ms. Ravitch who has made a career off of bashing left progressive educators, but I take this reversal as a positive development. In the realm of school policy discussion, this a major ideological about face by a key player in what has become a lock-step ideological consensus on school reform represented by a democratic party establishment under Obama and Arne Duncan that unflinchingly promote a radical corporate agenda in education. Ravitch’s voice may lend crucial support to an opposition who oppose instrumental market-based solutions to socio-educational problems on the basis that they undermine learning and threaten the public good.

Scholars U-Turn on School Reform Shakes Up the Debate

“We totally agreed with what she had to say,” said Eugene G. White, superintendent of the Indianapolis Public Schools. “We were amazed to see that she’d changed her tune.”

The superintendents gave Dr. Ravitch a standing ovation.

By SAM DILLON

Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups.

“School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview.

Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles.

“What’s Diane up to? That’s what people are asking.” said Grover J. Whitehurst, who was the director of the Department of Education’s research arm in the second Bush administration and is now Dr. Ravitch’s colleague at the Brookings Institution.

Among the topics on which Dr. Ravitch has reversed her views is the main federal law on public schools, No Child Left Behind, which is up for a rewrite in coming weeks in Congress. She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms. (more…)

As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, we find ourselves at one of those relatively rare moments in history when major power shifts become visible to all.  If the first decade of the century witnessed profound changes, the world of 2009 nonetheless looked at least somewhat like the world of 1999 in certain fundamental respects:  the United States remained the world’s paramount military power, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency, and NATO remained its foremost military alliance, to name just three.

By the end of the second decade of this century, however, our world is likely to have a genuinely different look to it.  Momentous shifts in global power relations and a changing of the imperial guard, just now becoming apparent, will be far more pronounced by 2020 as new actors, new trends, new concerns, and new institutions dominate the global space.  Nonetheless, all of this is the norm of history, no matter how dramatic it may seem to us.

(more…)

From the New York Times:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Bob Herbert’s column in the New York Times this morning extends some of my thoughts from yesterday. First, Herbert discusses how the “reform” bill promises to line the pockets of the insurance companies on the public’s dime:

It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.

Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.

Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.

Second, Herbert discusses the deals that have already been cut by the Obama administration with big pharma:

And then there are the drug companies. A couple of months ago the Obama administration made a secret and extremely troubling deal with the drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The lobby agreed to contribute $80 billion in savings over 10 years and to sponsor a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in support of health care reform.

The White House, for its part, agreed not to seek additional savings from the drug companies over those 10 years. This resulted in big grins and high fives at the drug lobby. The White House was rolled. The deal meant that the government’s ability to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices was off the table.

The $80 billion in savings (in the form of discounts) would apply only to a certain category of Medicare recipients — those who fall into a gap in their drug coverage known as the doughnut hole — and only to brand-name drugs. (Drug industry lobbyists probably chuckled, knowing that some patients would switch from generic drugs to the more expensive brand names in order to get the industry-sponsored discounts.)

To get a sense of how sweet a deal this is for the drug industry, compare its offer of $8 billion in savings a year over 10 years with its annual profits of $300 billion a year. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote that the deal struck by the Obama White House was very similar to the “deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry.”

Lastly, Herbert discusses how such “reform” fails in any meaningful sense to actually reform the health care system. While it would rightfully bring more Americans health care, and would not deny coverage based upon pre-existing conditions, it offers no real cost control and no real protections against the pervasive mistreatment of clients by health insurance providers. By throwing out a public option you eliminate public accountability in favor of profit logics which are utterly indifferent to providing quality care. This will only ensure the continued mediocrity of the US system which is currently ranked 19th by the World Health Organization, just ahead of Slovenia and just behind Costa-Rica. It also ensures that the public interest continues to be subordinated to the interests of the corporate class.

The evidence is mounting that the health care reform bill will not include a public option. As reported today by Democracy Now, a recent Business Week article entitled “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” suggests that the medical-industrial complex, in collusion with their anti-democratic right-wing allies, have managed to shape the health reform debate to such a degree that it is all but certain that the Obama administration and the democrats (many of whom are also owned by big pharma and health insurance corps) will cave on the public option. Here is a qoute from the article:

The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.

As insightfully outlined by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, this reform agenda is shaping up to be nothing more than a corporate sham and an utter disgrace to democracy. It represents an absolute indifference to the public good by both the Obama administration and the democrats. If they abandon a public option there will be nothing in place to keep the insurance companies honest and will guarantee trillions of dollars funneled directly from taxpayers into government subsidies for the health insurance companies. The abandonment of a public option will thus enable the further upward redistribution of wealth from the public to the private and is painfully indicative of the steady erosion of the American democratic project. I fear it also signals the looming failure of the Obama presidency.

I just caught up with two articles on Alternet that offer a pretty compelling argument for why congress should go forward with criminal investigations of the Bush administration. 

The first article offers us a short top-ten on the mess Bush created.

They read as follows:

1. The worst recession since the 1930s. The current recession will be the deepest and longest downturn since the Great Depression. And unlike other recessions, this one was directly caused by conservative anti-regulatory policy. In fact, recent evaluations show that Bush policies never created any real growth — the ephemeral financial upswings of the past eight years were based on market bubbles and economic Band-Aids.

2. The worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The Bush administration, flacking an “ownership society,” helped manufacture the housing bubble. When it burst, Americans lost $6 trillion in housing wealth (so far), fueling a market crash that has cost Americans $8 trillion of stock wealth, according to economist Dean Baker. On a grand scale, we’ve been mugged.

3. The worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. That’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., correctly called the Iraq war. This pre-emptive war — based on phony pretenses — is now the second longest in our nation’s history (after Vietnam). Some 35,000 Americans are dead or wounded, as well as an enormous number of innocent Iraqis. And even today, more than five years later, can anyone explain why Bush marched us into this quagmire?

4. Unprecedented rejection of human rights. Recently, a Bush administration official finally admitted that the U.S. government engaged in torture at Guantanamo Bay detention center. Bush admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding. While these clear violations of the Geneva Conventions would have been unthinkable a few years ago, today we’re not surprised. From Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, to years-long detention of innocents and the unrestrained killing of civilians by U.S.-paid mercenaries, this administration has systematically squandered our nation’s moral standing in the world, making us less able to protect Americans and American interests worldwide.

5. Watergate-style abuses of power. As the House Judiciary Committee staff has documented, Bush used the politics of fear and division to justify warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans (including U.S. soldiers fighting overseas), spying on peaceful domestic groups and the use of national security letters to pry into the private records of millions of Americans. He also presided over illegal politicization of the Justice Department and retribution against critics. In fact, Bush claimed the authority to disobey hundreds of laws — as if Richard Nixon were right when he famously said: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

6. Unprecedented increases in inequality. The Economic Policy Institute reports, “For the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data back in the mid-1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of this business cycle than they were when it started.” That’s because Bush policy was designed to increase economic inequality. The richest 1 percent of the population received 36 percent of the Bush tax cuts; the least-affluent 40 percent received only 9 percent. While the rich got exponentially richer, the poverty rate and the percentage of uninsured dramatically increased.

7. A culture of sleaze. This was an administration without shame. Kicked off by Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force, the administration fostered a “greed is good” culture. The subsequent conservative money scandals (Jack Abramoff; White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian;  Republicans Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Duke Cunningham of California and Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska) and other lawlessness (Cheney’s Chief of Staff O. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho) have toppled the conservative “moral values” façade into the gutter, where it belongs.

8. Blind rejection of science. The Bush administration thumbed its nose at scientific evidence that contradicted conservative political goals. The resulting lies about global warming, endangered species, toxic chemicals and consumer products threaten the health and safety of every American. And the virtual outlawing of stem cell research has delayed important medical advances by years, causing immeasurable suffering and loss of life.

9. Utter refusal to protect the health, safety and legal rights of Americans. Following the conservative business-is-always-right philosophy, Bush dismantled the agencies and rules designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous businesses, workers from reckless employers and small companies from anti-competitive large companies. If conservatives didn’t like a federal law, they blocked, hindered or defunded agency enforcement.

10. Presiding over our nation’s worst natural disaster, and not caring. Hurricane Katrina was transformed from a calamity into a national disgrace by the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration. Before the hurricane struck, Bush had downsized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and placed in charge a political crony with no relevant experience. When Katrina ripped through Mississippi and Louisiana and inflicted nearly $100 billion in damages in New Orleans to become the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, FEMA was unprepared to help, and thousands of Americans suffered the consequences. More than three years later, New Orleans still has not recovered.

The second article is an op-ed by Paul Krugman that first appeared in the New York Times on monday. Here Krugman makes the case that Bush and his cronies must be held accountable for their abuses of power and for their violations of U.S. and international law. If the law is to mean anything, he argues, then investigations must go forward in order to hold the Bush administration accountable for their misdeeds. While such investigations may prove divisive and distracting, I agree with Krugman that this should not stand in the way of pursuing justice. 

Even up here in the snowy northern climes of Canada the inauguration of Barack Obama is shaping up to be a major cultural event. For the past few days its been wall to wall coverage on Canadian tv and radio. I am sure that today between the times of 11am and 1pm worker productivity will take a significant hit as offices and classrooms tune in to watch the big event.

After witnessing the utterly grotesque spectacle of Bush’s final media outings last week - designed no less to salvage what he could of his ignominious reputation - the contrast in personal style, intellect, and competency with Obama could not be more apparent. There can be no doubt that Obama’s inauguration signals a hopeful break with the Bush years as well as a moment of great significance in the ongoing history of race and civil rights in the United States. Most Canadians certainly recognize this and they appear relieved to have an incomming U.S. president who can a) speak in complete sentences and b) can locate Canada on a map.

While I cannot help feeling hopeful about what Obama’s presidency might mean for the direction of U.S. policy and political culture, these hopes are tempered by the sobering magnitude of the economic, environmental, and social challenges that lie ahead. Moreover, based so far on his cabinet appointments as well as his public rhetoric, Obama does not appear ready to take on the entrenched corporate and right-wing interests standing in the way of real progressive change. As such, I will be feeling a mixture of hope, joy, and apprehension as I watch Obama take his oath today.