You Can’t Fatten Your Cows by Constantly Weighing Them More Often

You Can’t Fatten Your Cows by Constantly Weighing Them More Often
by Myles Hoenig

Thanks to Chris Nielson for this title’s line and to the nearly dozens of other speakers on Thursday and this weekend who comprise the line up of activist educators in Washington, DC for the Occupy the Department of Education 2.0.

This year’s show of force is sponsored by United Opt Out, a parents/teachers based grass roots organization dedicated to having public school children in America refuse to take high stakes tests throughout the school year. Founder Peggy Robertson of Colorado, teacher and parent, called on all to demand creative learning and an end to the dismantling of public schools.

There was a small kick-off gathering at the Department of Education site but the movement has been growing with enormous strength since 2011 with the Save Our Schools March on Washington, where nearly 10,000 educators and parents from all over the US braved the hottest day of the year to show how we are fed up with the privatization of our public education. There is a revolt going on and it’s catching fire. The brave teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle refused to administer their high stakes test. Parents all over the country are now aware of their rights as parents to opt their kids out, and often with no negative consequences to their children’s academic futures.

At this years event, speaker after speaker, from school librarians, teachers, careerists-turned educators, parents and the occasional wonk spoke passionately of how huge corporations have amassed fortunes at the expense of public school children. Powerful forces are at work to squeeze every dollar they can from children’s daily experiences at schools. It wasn’t lost on anyone that 400 Maryland Ave SW should be renamed the Gates-Pearson building (Bill Gates, Pearson Publishers), rather than the Department of Education. Diane Ravitch, former Assistant Secretary of Education and author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) repeatedly pointed her finger to the top floors of the DOE to say how they don’t listen to educators but only those who can profit off the data mining that testing provides.

The injustices that prevail in the US regarding our children’s education can be summed up in two ways: child labor and child abuse. The Tennessee state government is considering legislation to tie a child’s test score to the family’s welfare check. The pressures put on these children are beyond cruel and inhumane. Forcing a child to do well on often bogus tests as a way of supporting a family’s income and survivability should be condemned in all possible ways. The abuse all children submit to throughout the school year with endless testing, data collecting, and the denial of the arts, libraries, physical education, is one that would never be tolerated for the kids of those making educational policy. It’s no surprise that the private schools that produce the elite laugh at the idea of such high stakes testing or mindless and numbing curricula whose purpose is only to prepare the students to pass such tests. A creative curriculum is for their kids, the children of Bill Gates and President Obama, not urban and rural kids who are likely to be of color and certainly of lower income.

5 years after President Nixon resigned no one claimed to have ever voted for him. Now, the very forces involved in destroying public education are ‘coming around’. Fox news the other day did a story on how the Common Core for curriculum was written by private interests, but endorsed by government. Joel Klein, former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, has joined Murdoch’s News Corp’s as Executive Vice President. He also acquired Wireless Generation, the IT company that data mines NY’s schools. Bill Gates even now talks of how testing is going overboard. Could this be the aristocracy of France trying to fend off the Jacobins before their heads rolled off the guillotine? Or in more recent history is it more akin to the senior Nazi high command who switched allegiance to the Allies when Berlin was falling?

Like every other public service, education is for sale. Students are widgets or commodities with a price tag. Teachers are no more than McDonald’s-like employees forced to create uniform results and discarding those who don’t make the grade. Many are leaving the profession. Those entering are now the tools of a multi-billion dollar industry. Who will win out will depend on whether or not we see a revolution in education carried out by the parents, students and teachers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Myles Hoenig is an educational advocate and veteran ESOL teacher with Baltimore City and Prince George’s County public schools. His email is hoenigedu@gmail.com.

“When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Che Guevara

This Is How The Revolution Begins; Adbusters Tactical Briefing #42.

By Ad Busters

cross posted from adbusters, and opednews

#GOLDMAN:

Hey all you wild spirits out there,

Here is how the Global Spring begins:

A few lone wolves among us start pasting posters in and around Goldman Sachs HQ at 200 West Street, Manhattan, New York. Groups of two or three turn up and hand out leaflets at their branch office at Maria de Molina 6-5a, Madrid, Spain. People start gathering and having fun outside Goldman’s offices in 50 cities…

Then . . . on Thursday May 23, when Goldman Sachs holds its annual shareholders meeting at 222 South Main Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 500 people turn up and solidarity games are held across the world. It gets serious when thousands start playing on September 17 in front of Goldman’s branches in Los Angeles, Toronto, Moscow,London, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Beijing, Mexico City. The media picks up on this fledgling global revolt. . .

And, one fine day, the whole thing suddenly catches fire . . . #GOLDMAN becomes a rallying cry for people everywhere to rise up against the financial fraudsters who have been f*cking around with our lives for far too long.

When the moment is ripe, all it takes is a spark.

for the wild,
Kono Matsu / kono at adbusters.org
Culture Jammers HQ

P.S. Find teammates and Goldman Sachs locations at meetup.com/goldman

Catch up on the gameplay thus far, here.

Now print this poster, and plaster it all over the world!

Submitters Website: http://adbusters.org
Submitters Bio:

The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit , anti-consumerist , pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver , British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.”

Characterized by some as anti-capitalist or opposed to capitalism, it publishes the reader-supported, advertising-free Adbusters, an activist magazine with an international circulation of 120,000 devoted to challenging consumerism. Past and present contributors to the magazine include Christopher Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Bill McKibben, Jim Munroe, Douglas Rushkoff, Jonathan Barnbrook, David Graeber, Simon Critchley, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, David Orrell and others.

Adbusters has launched numerous international campaigns, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and Occupy Wall Street, and is known for their “subvertisements” that spoof popular advertisements.

Banned by Truthout

Some Beg, Others Do

by DAVE LINDORFF

Lindorff

Have you even noticed that you don’t see articles from ThisCantBeHappening! running on the Truthout site?

There’s a reason for this. Truthout, over a year ago, decided to ban our publication’s articles from its pages.

They took this ridiculous and incredibly lacking-in-alternative-media-solidarity step not because our work is flawed. Not because we had made some embarrassing mistake. Not even because we demanded payment for their use of our work.

No. They banned us because I had the temerity to question their news judgement when they ignored some breaking stories that we w

Want examples? Well, let’s see — there are so many! — let’s go back to April 10, 2012, when we ran The Potential Killers All Around Us, about the wide-spread use of killer hollow-point bullets by police. It got ignored by Truthout, so nobody read it who didn’t read our publication. I specifically called the attention of several TO editors to the piece, sending it to them individually too, and got no response. Or how about A Conspiracy of Whores, a piece by our war-and-peace beat journalist John Grant which we ran on April 20. John reported on the blacked-out info that the right-wing president of Colombia was calling the U.S. Drug War a bust. Important news right? But because we were the only ones reporting it, and Truthout blacked us out, even when we specifically wrote them and suggested they run it, Truthout readers, like the Americans who only watch the mainstream media, didn’t learn about it.

When Alex Cockburn, co-founder of Counterpunch.org, died after a long carefully hidden battle with cancer, I noticed that TO was ignoring his tragic and untimely death, and so on July 22 I sent them an obit that we ran. That time I did chastize them for ignoring the passing of such an important journalist on the left. They ignored my submission, and only later ran a much less informative obit, written by a columnist for the Nation, a publication that had repeatedly undermined and insulted Cockburn, despite his being the most popular writer for the magazine.

On Nov. 15 last year, when radical journalist Mike Caddell penned a desperate piece about the all-out state government attack on his wife, a doctor who had helped murdered abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas to provide late term abortions to desperate women and girls who had been raped or victims of incest, I specifically wrote to Truthout’s editors asking that they run his story so sympathetic people across the nation would know and come to their aid. They blew it off. Why? Because we were being banned. In other words, to hell with the victim of right-wing charlatans and fundamentalist Christian witch-hunters in Kansas! The important thing is maintaining an iron-clad ban on a little news organization with an uppity bunch of writers! Also last November, we sent over to TO an urgently important piece we were running about the unconstitutional and unethical behavior of a new Obama nominee for the federal bench written by our own Linn Washington, one of the most respected African-American journalists in the country. TO ignored it too, because of our being banned.

And so it goes. At Truthout (ironically given their choice of name), petulant behavior by fragile-egoed editors comes first; politically important and even urgent news comes decidedly second, or not at all in our case. As for solidarity with smaller alternative news organizations? Forget it! And woe to any alternative journalist who dares to question those TO editors’ judgements by suggesting that they run a time-sensitive and important news article being ignored by the MSM rather than a reprint of an opinion piece by a New York Times columnist whose work is all over the internet anyway, whether they run it or not! That, we’re told, is being “abrasive.”

So, here’s the point: Truthout is begging for money again. They say they need $25,000 to keep their operation going. It’s something they do periodically all year round. And a lot of people do give them money, buying their line about offering up “fearless journalism.” That’s a bit of an overstatement though. If the truth be out, they are a fearful bunch over at TO — afraid of criticism from writers. They screw their own writers too, we hear, who had to form a union for protection, and who still end up having to threaten to take management to arbitration because of unfair labor practices.) And of course, Truthout is not above banning news, even important news that needs to get to their readership.

We at TCBH! believe that what is needed to combat the corporate media propaganda that passes for news these days in America is not so much “news aggregators” like Truthout, but publications like ours that actually produce real, radical journalism, not just reprints of other people’s work — including the work of corporate journalists whose articles are already getting circulated in the MSM. Some larger alternative media organizations — notably Counterpunch, Oped News and Smirking Chimp, support us by regularly running our work. Some, like Common Dreams, run us occasionally. We urge you to support them.

Truthout bans us.

Now to do what we do, we obviously need money. So far though, for three years we’ve been doing our work on a shoestring budget of about $3000, basically by exploiting ourselves, and writing for free. We need your support so that the members of our little collective can give up at least some of our day jobs to pursue this effort on a closer-to-full-time basis. So instead of giving money to a bloated and abusive outfit like TO, which is actually doing very little to push the envelope and combat corporate propaganda, and which is actually actively undermining the efforts of small true radical journalistic publications like ThisCantBeHappening!, consider giving some financial support to us. Of if you insist on giving TO a donation, at least deduct $5 from it and send that to us.

We aren’t asking for much from our readers. There are about 50,000 of you, but only a tiny fraction of you send us any money. If you’d all just give us $5 per year each — the cost of three cups of coffee or half of one movie ticket! — we’d have enough money to all work practically full-time at this business, and everyone would benefit. Hell, Truthout might even have to lift its ban and run some of our stuff.

And we wouldn’t demand payment from them for lifting it. We’d be glad to let them have our stuff for free (though they would have to agree to stop being so hyper-sensitive about inquiries as to why they were sitting on certain time-sensitive news stories).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Lindorff is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He lives in Philadelphia.