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By Jerry White, WSWS.ORG

The Chicago teachers’ strike, which entered its second week on Monday, has laid bare the social and political dynamic of the United States.

Since their strike began one week ago, teachers have faced the ferocious hostility of the entire political and media establishment, which has treated their efforts to defend public education as if the strikers were their slaves. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the teachers were seeking to oppose the “arc of history,” by which they meant the efforts of the ruling class to rip up every social gain made by working people over generations of struggle.

Having slashed funding for public education for decades and pursued policies resulting in a vast increase in poverty, the Democrats and Republicans are united in scapegoating teachers and using test scores to fire them and accelerate the process of privatizing education.

The strike in Chicago is a test case in the reactionary school “reform” agenda of the Obama administration. It is no accident it is taking place in Chicago—the home of the Democratic Party machine that propelled Obama into the White House—and that teachers are pitted against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff and the current head of fundraising for the president’s reelection campaign.

On Sunday, a meeting of teachers’ delegates rejected the attempt of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to end the strike on terms that accept all of the demands of Mayor Emanuel. The teachers refused to be stampeded into accepting a sellout.

Mayor Emanuel, who pocketed earnings of $16 million as an investment banker in two-and-a-half years after his 1998 departure from the Clinton White House, is outraged that the delegates insisted that they and the membership at least be allowed to know the exact terms of the settlement before calling off the struggle.

Emanuel’s response is to seek a court injunction to force teachers back to the work, arguing the strike is “illegal” and that it is “a clear and present danger to public health and safety.” This is coming from a mayor who is seeking to dismantle public education in Chicago and confine the vast majority of children to a future of poverty, overcrowded classrooms in deteriorating schools, and unemployment.

A court has delayed a hearing until Wednesday. If teachers do not capitulate Tuesday and vote the “right” way at the next House of Delegates meeting, the injunction is set to go forward with the threat of massive fines, firings and arrests.

This recalls more than Reagan’s firing of the PATCO air traffic controllers. The ruling class in Chicago has a long history of responding to the class struggle with an iron fist. This is a city where four leaders of the eight-hour day movement—the Haymarket martyrs—were sent to the gallows in 1887, a dozen striking steelworkers were gunned down in 1937, and two young Black Panther civil rights leaders—Fred Hampton and Mark Clark—were murdered by Chicago police in cold blood in 1969.

As for the CTU, it has revealed itself to be absolutely unwilling and incapable of leading a struggle to defend the teachers. The CTU bureaucracy, led by Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey, a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), never intended to wage a serious struggle. The CTU called the strike merely as a means of letting off steam. The intention from the start has been to accept terms worked out behind closed doors with the mayor.

Caught off guard by the opposition of teachers—who reportedly shouted at the CTU leaders to “get it right”—Lewis sought to justify the betrayal by insisting that the contract, though not “good,” was “the deal we got.” In reality, it was the deal she and Sharkey accepted in lieu of conducting a struggle against the Democratic Party, the Rahm Emanuel administration in Chicago, and the Obama administration in Washington.

Regardless of the opposition of the teachers, the CTU is determined to push through a sellout. Lewis and Sharkey welcome Emanuel’s threat to obtain an injunction. They hope that this will convince teachers that further resistance is futile.

The policy of the CTU is determined not by teachers, but by the bureaucracy’s political alliance with the Democratic Party and its acceptance of and support for the existing capitalist set-up. Lewis has said that what teachers can achieve is restricted by the school district’s budget deficit. Moreover, the CTU has accepted city plans to close more than 100 schools and add 60 more charters, saying only that it wants this to be done with the collaboration of the union, rather than unilaterally.

The course of the strike has laid bare not only the relationship of classes, but also the mechanisms of class rule. The ruling class maintains an elaborate network of political institutions and organizations to preserve its control over the working class and regulate and suppress social opposition.

The trade union apparatus plays the principal role in this suppression. Behind the unions stand various pseudo-left groups like the ISO. Whatever “left” and even “socialistic” rhetoric they employ, the ISO and similar organizations speak for a layer of the upper-middle class that is deeply hostile to any independent political struggle of the working class. They are desperate to maintain the authority of the unions over the working class, and through it the subordination of the working class to the Democratic Party.

The Chicago teachers’ struggle is a decisive battle to defend public education. This struggle can be won, but only if teachers make a direct appeal to the working class as a whole. There is enormous support for teachers among workers, parents and young people throughout Chicago and across the country.

This potential can be mobilized only if the class issues are explained and a fight organized on the basis of a struggle against the Democratic Party and the profit system it defends.

Jerry White is a senior political analyst with wsws.org, a socialist organization.

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By Arlen Grossman

US military bases in the Middle East region.  [Source: Democratic Underground]

Americans are being attacked and shot at in the Middle East for more than just bad movies. A long history of war and interference in this region is the main reason we are disliked in the many of these countries.

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I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in suggesting that the reason Americans are being targeted and killed in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries in the Middle East might have something to do with our overwhelming and seemingly endless presence in that region. The United States and other Western powers have been attacking, occupying, and otherwise interfering with oil-rich countries in this region for decades now, most recently with our unprovoked war in Iraq and our eleven-year ongoing occupation in Afghanistan. It would be strange if most of the people in the Middle East weren’t sick of us. But it wouldn’t be strange to assume that every military strike causing civilian deaths is creating future enemies for the United States.

I daresay Americans wouldn’t appreciate a Middle East Muslim nation, Egypt or Yemen, for example,  occupying and/or interfering with our country. Imagine how we would feel if Egyptians built military bases on our soil, bombed Americans who resisted their occupation, and when accidentally killing civilians, chalked it up to “collateral damage.” My guess is millions of Americans would resist, and those who fought back would be labeled “terrorists” by the Egyptian occupiers and “freedom fighters” by fellow Americans. In contrast, those who attack Americans on their own soil in Afghanistan or Iraq are often referred to as “terrorists” by our media.

warchat.org
You’d think we would have figured out long ago that other countries don’t appreciate our interference in their sovereign nations, especially when it is a Western Christian culture totally alien to theirs. You’d think it would be obvious that preemptively invading other countries is unwelcome and wrong, and the longer we stay, the sooner we wear out our “welcome.”

What if we took all the money we’re squandering on Middle East wars, and instead, with permission, invested in building up and helping the people of that region?  Wouldn’t they appreciate a little help with food, water, medicine, education, health, nutrition, and building a democracy? Alternatively, if Americans might resent them receiving help that our own citizens aren’t getting, how about if we pulled out and left the region to solve it’s own problems? Either way, you can bet there’d be less reason for them to fear, distrust and hate us.  You could call such assistance (or non-interference) generous, neighborly, diplomatic, or just plain common sense. Unfortunately, those are commodities that can’t be used to fuel factories or cars–but they could assist in bringing the Middle East closer to something they haven’t experienced in a long time–peace.

Submitters Website: thebigpicturereport.com

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September 17, 2012
THIS WEEK
In this week’s Too Much, we have these numbers and more.   a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common GoodSubscribe to Too MuchInequality.orgJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
GREED AT A GLANCE
gravity neutral point” near the moon. Seats go for $150 million each. Interested in more bargain-oriented space travel? Virgin Galactic is promising a two-hour suborbital flight, with five minutes of weightlessness, for just $200,000. Over 500 future space-goers have so far booked a ticket . . . handed Birkenfeld a $104 million whistle-blower award for outing Swiss banking secrets. The Romney link? His 2010 return and other records indicate a Swiss banking account and a family tie to UBS. Romney, analysts speculate, may have taken advantage of the 2009 IRS amnesty . . .Agree or disagree: “Money is the only thing I can really count on.” Researchers from three different U.S. universities recently put this comment — and a host of related observations — to a broad cross-section of Americans in a series of laboratory experiments designed to have people imagine themselves in stressful and chaotic situations. The researchers found a “dramatic polarization” in the responses from rich and poor. The affluent tended to focus “on holding onto and attaining wealth,” the poor on “spending more time with friends and loved ones.” The research, funded partly by the National Science Foundation, “suggests that in times of economic uncertainty and social instability disparities between the haves and the have-nots could grow ever wider.” Quote of the Week“Since the late 1970s, economic policy has increasingly served the interests of those with the most wealth, income, and political power and effectively shifted economic returns from typical American families to the already well-off.” Lawrence Mishel, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America, 12th edition, Economic Policy Institute, September 12, 2012
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
the headline, “Get Lost, You Jerk!” Arnault quickly sued. His citizenship move, he asserted, had no tax-dodging intent. But news reports soon revealed that Arnault had talkedabout France’s impending tax hike with a Belgian public official — and reminded readers that Arnault had left France back in 1981, the last time a newly elected French president had threatened higher taxes on the wealthy.
PROGRESS AND PROMISE
a proposition to raise the state tax rate from 10.3 percent on income over $1 million to 12.3 percent over $500,000. Revenue from this Prop 30 will help prevent local public service cutbacks, and users and providers of those services — from the Los Angeles Child Care Alliance to the Chief Probation Officers of California — are backing the measure. Meanwhile, from the University of California at Berkeley has come new research that bolsters the case for stiff taxes on the state’s rich. States with low tax rates on the rich, the research documents, turn out to gain no statistically significant economic and job creation advantage. _________ Take Action on InequalitySupport the “the next chapter in the fight against plutocracy,” the ongoing Chicago teacher struggle against the top 1 percent agenda for America’s schools.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
IN FOCUS
have no library. To help homeless and other children in unstable family situations, the 350,000-student Chicago schools have only 370 social workers.One reason: The conventional wisdom can be unconventionally profitable for the corporate execs who run the rapidly expanding chains of charter schools. At campaign time, these execs love to show their appreciation. But support for the teacher-bashing conventional wisdom goes well beyond the ranks of those who stand to profit directly from public education’s privatization. In affluent cocktail party circles, as the New Yorker magazine noted last week, “a certain casual demonization of teachers has become sufficiently culturally prevalent that it passes for uncontroversial.” The well-heeled today, adds the New Yorker analysis, talk about breaking teacher unions “with the same kind of social enthusiasm” usually reserved for recommending “a new Zumba class.” This teacher bashing has been spreading for several decades now, ever since the United States first began growing much more unequal in the 1980s. This linkage should surprise no one. These two basic phenomena — a rich growing richer and a rich growing more hostile to public services and the people who provide them — have always gone hand in hand. Wealthy people, after all, don’t typically use much in the way of public services. They don’t partake of public parks or public education. They belong to private country clubs and send their kids to private schools, and they royally resent having to pay taxes to support public services they don’t use. These well-to-do need rationalizations for this resentment, and teacher bashing makes for an ideal one. We don’t need to “throw money” at troubled schools, the argument goes. We just have to find and fire all those lousy teachers. Interestingly, back in the much more equal United States of the 1950s, we did “throw money” at schools — and plenty of it. In 1958, after the shock of the Soviet Sputnik launch, lawmakers didn’t bash teachers. They appropriated billions, through the National Defense Education Act, to strengthen schools. A half-dozen years later, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act vastly expanded funding for low-income students. puts it, has to be about as absurd as “blaming doctors for the diseases they are seeking to treat.” But bashing makes sense to the rich. And in a plutocracy, the rich drive the debate — until the rest of us rise up and change the conversation. In Chicago, teachers have now done just that. Like this article? Subscribe and get Too Much in your email inbox every Monday. Email this Too Much issue to a friend New Wisdom on Wealth James Ledbetter,  What exactly do we mean by ‘inequality’? Reuters, September 11, 2012. In recent decades, we’ve forgotten how to grow the economy except by increasing inequality. The result: a series of bubbles, and bubbles always do damage when they pop.David Korten, Growth or Equality: Two Competing Visions for America’s Future, Yes! September 13, 2012. On how closing the wealth gap can open the way to a fairer, more prosperous economy.Salvatore Babones, How to End Hard Times? Reduce Inequality, Inequality.Org, September 13, 2012. A new United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report details how equality promotes economic growth.Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, What Krugman & Stiglitz Can Tell Us, New York Review of Books, September 27, 2012. That CEOs could cause so much damage and suffer no paycheck pain “suggests an extraordinary culture of self-justification.”
NEW AND NOTABLE
Why Inequality Matters, a pamphlet produced by members of My Fair London in association with the Equality Trust, with funding support from Centre for Labour and Social Studies, September 2012, 32 pp.In years gone by, people who worried about growing gaps between the rich and everyone else used to voice their concerns in abstract moral terms. Growing inequality, egalitarians would argue, endangers our democracy. But today’s egalitarian advocacy has become much more concrete. Worry about inequality? We sure should. Inequality impacts almost every aspect of our everyday lives, from our health to the trust we have in one another. This new pamphlet, a labor of love by activists with My Fair London, offers a solid, UK-oriented intro into the inequality research evidence. But you don’t have to be British to pick up new insights from these bright and lucid pages.Web GemOccupy Together An online networking hubfor all things Occupy-related.
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies | 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 | (202) 234-9382 | Editor: Sam Pizzigati. | E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org | Unsubscribe.

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by THOMAS KNAPP

You know the quadrennial refrain: Americans are politically “polarized.” Half of us are ranting right-wing Torquemadists, the other half are raving left-wing Jacobins, and by implication the country faces a stark binary choice between those two approaches to government.

It’s caricature, of course. Most Americans — and I say this as a hardcore fringe radical! — are mired in the muddled middle, and this November’s presidential election presents those Americans, as usual, with a choice between two timid, ever-so-slightly right of center, non-entities whose only bankable promises are to not tinker much with the status quo.

No, you say? Obama and Romney are nothing at all alike? Well, let’s dispose of that in one swell foop and with one word: “Obamacare.”

“Conservative” Republican Mitt Romney beta-tested “Obamacare” as governor of Massachusetts — a decade and change after “conservative” Republicans proposed and backed its main feature, the “individual mandate” in 1993 (following 12 years of a Republican White House and right before the GOP’s first re-seizure of congressional control in 40 years; not exactly a timeframe in which Republicans could be reasonably described as playing defense, but rather a time when they were most apt to be out front with exactly what they really wanted).

“Liberal” Obama rammed the Romney 2006 / Gingrich 1993 proposal through Congress at the national level … and that makes him “the most left-wing president in American history.” So he must be replaced. By Romney. Some stark choice there, huh?

This alleged “polarization” between America’s major political parties is pure hooey, but it’s necessary to keeping the game interesting. After all, if the game gets too boring, people might decide to take away the Democrats’ and Republicans’ ball and go play something else.

Enter hyperbole. Whether it’s LBJ’s 1964 ad with the little girl getting vaporized in a thermonuclear explosion if Goldwater won, or Chuck and Gena Norris’s suggestion that Obama’s re-election might cue the extinction of freedom and “thousand years of darkness” which Old Testament prophet Ronald Reagan warned of, wild exaggerations about the existential importance of this year’s presidential beauty contest are the only way to “keep the skeer up.”

The hype has gotten so outrageous that it’s frankly becoming a huge tiresome bore. Every Democratic administration is “the most left-wing in history.” Every Republican administration is “trying to drag us back to the Middle Ages” (or at least to the pre-Martin-Luther-King era). But on even cursory examination, there’s so little light between the two offerings that Kate Moss would have a difficult time squeezing between them.

The prime directive for Republican and Democratic politicians — and for that matter, increasingly even among “third party” candidates” — is to not rock the boat. They’re all auditioning for the role of William F. Buckley’s archetypal conservative, seeking the job of standing athwart the train tracks of history yelling “stop!”

At 364 years of age, the Westphalian nation-state is a doddering, senile institution. It’s on its last legs. It no longer aspires to great new things, but merely hopes to hold on to what it has for as long as possible before it strokes out or just dies quietly in its sleep.

In terms of everyday exercise of power, it’s mostly been reduced in recent years to shuffling out on its front porch and yelling at the neighborhood youngsters — non-state peer networks actually doing everything the state has always claimed to do but failed miserably at — to get off its lawn.

Its elections, and the attendant hype, are the equivalent of waving its cane at said youngsters in a futile attempt to scare them out of knocking it down, breaking its hip and forcing it to listen to that new-fangled “jazz” music while it waits for an ambulance to pick it up and transport it to the nearest hospice facility.

The real question is not who runs the state for the next four years. The real question is what comes after the state. Everything else is just vaudeville, badly performed as a distraction from that question.

Thomas L. Knapp is Senior News Analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society.

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