OlsonOnline

"Obsession" protest at the O (with remarks by Anne Trudeau)

Any doubt that the DVD Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West isn't an endorsement of McCain should be dispelled by the fact that its newspaper distribution occurred primarily in swing voting states.

Anyway, here's a video of the Center for Intercultural Organizing protest of the Oregonian's distribution of Obsession, featuring our own Anne Trudeau.  The video was produced by local radio host Opio Osokoni.

Maybe Nader's the one

After Barack Obama's lackluster performance in Friday night's presidential debate, maybe it's time to look elsewhere.  Maybe it's time to give Ralph Nader a shot --a shot to at least debate the two major party candidates.

After all, Ross Perot had that opportunity in 1992. 

You don't think Nader would have made mincemeat of McCain?  Obama sure didn't, despite having ample opportunity to expose McCain as a flip-flopping hypocrite, a dedicated militarist, and a supply-side economic dunce. 

Consider.  Obama failed utterly to pin the supply-side, trickle down tax-cuts-for-the-rich label on McCain.  McCain gave him the opportunity on more than one occasion, particularly when he accused Obama of not understanding who the rich really are.  Say what?  Families pulling down $250 grand a year aren't rich?  Opportunity missed, without even a mention of McCain's original opposition to the Bush tax cuts.  (If there was, I missed it.)

Here's another example of a missed opening.  McCain ridiculed Obama for his willingness to negotiate with enemies "without preconditions."  Instead of coming back immediately with "You clearly don't understand the meaning of 'preconditions', John", Obama fumbled around with something about Ahmedinejad perhaps not being the most important figure in Iran, and then some platitude about reserving the right as President to negotiate with anyone, before finally defining the term "preconditions" for McCain.  (McCain clearly confused preconditions* with preparations.)

Same with the difference between strategy and tactics, which McCain erroneously accused Obama of not understanding.  In his post-debate interview, Joe Biden said concisely what Obama should have said.  In fact, Obama left the entire "surge" success pretty much untouched and unclarified. 

Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University, listed 15 things Obama needed to do in his debates with McCain.  After the first debate Westen was asked whether Obama had followed his advice.  His answer was no, in fact he may have done just the opposite of what was suggested.  On all 15 counts.

The problem is not just that Obama lacks debating skills, although he does.  The problem is that he's simply wrong on many of the fundamental issues that define this campaign.

Compare Obama to Ralph Nader on the issues, especially health care, the miitary, the economy, and Middle East policy.   Nader is right on single payer national health care, on cutting the bloated military budget, on corporate crime and welfare, and on U.S. policies in Israel and throughout the Middle East.  On support for Israel and increasing the military budget, Obama and McCain are nearly indistinguishable.

Oregon should be a slam dunk win for Obama.  Out of principal, I may have to cast my vote for the candidate who best represents my views --Ralph Nader. 

*(Abraham Lincoln was a President who negotiated without "preconditions" in a time of "great national peril".)

"Kick a buck" for me, Paul Newman

Why doesn't the PPS website report ALL school related news?

Here I read in Willamette Week that Jefferson High School's Young Men's Academy is in danger of going under, perhaps as early as December due to paltry enrollment, yet I find no mention of it on the district's news website.

Not a word.  A hint.  Or even a passing reference. 

I did read about the district's 14 National Merit Scholar semi-finalists, all from either Cleveland, Grant, Wilson, Metropolitan Learning Center, or, of course, Lincoln.  But nothing about the failed experiment with gender-specific "academies" at Jeff. 

Isn't that newsworthy?  Or is the PPS communications staff charged with only reporting  the good news? 

Here's what Willy Week reported in its Murmurs section:

"Jefferson High School’s Young Men’s Academy, a boys-only school designed for students in sixth through 10th grades, lost its 10th grade last Friday after seven of its nine students decided to transfer to different district high schools. Now the entire Academy’s fate is hanging, since there are no students in what was supposed to be its sixth grade and only 33 students remaining in grades 7, 8 and 9. Toni Hunter, an assistant superintendent with Portland Public Schools, says she’ll decide by Dec. 1 the future of the Academy, which opened in 2007 as the brainchild of former superintendent Vicki Phillips."

"Only 33 students" left for three of the five grades.  No students for the sixth grade class, and just about the entire 10th grade has transferred out.  That's news.  Bad news.

Quite a brainchild, Vicki Phillips. 

Despite the impending collapse of the all boys' academy, I read on the district's main site, which features a smiling Little Orphan Annie lookalike, that the school year is off to a great start. 

That's may be true, at least at some schools.

Just not at Jefferson High.

(Thanks to Lynn Schore for the tip.)

Chomsky, or Ron Paul?

Long hiatus during a trip to the hinterlands, but I still have economics and socialism on my mind.

On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan got into it with Naomi Klein of Shock Doctrine fame.  He concluded petulantly that the near collapse of Wall Street validated not Noam Chomsky, but libertarian Ron Paul.

Just prior to that exchange, video guest Paul Krugman claimed (somewhat humorously) that just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in financial crises.  Sullivan was offended.  Thus his reference to Chomsky and Paul.

Libertarians espouse a utopian pure free market system, a capitalism unsullied by the sticky fingers of the state.  Libertarian Kenn Jacobine, for example, writes

"Quite frankly, the crisis that caused those bailouts to happen in the first place would not have happened if we were a pure capitalist country."

Jacobine describes the American approach as a "bastardized system".

Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, claims that capitalism is inherently undemocratic:

"The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

"That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system."

Libertarians will read into that the emphasis on "state capitalist institutions".  But I doubt Chomsky believes in the possibility of an unadulterated capitalist utopia unfettered by state interventions. 

Libertarians would dearly love to privatize the socialist elements of our economy, primarily the public service sector --schools, roads, traffic control, parks, zoning, police, fire departments, libraries, parks, county health and welfare services, corrections, building inspections, animal control, water and sewage-- services provided by and for the people through their democratically elected governments.

In a libertarian capitalist utopia, those services would be provided by efficient profit-driven private markets.  That's the libertarian ideology.

I, on the other hand, would like to see the expansion of state run (or at least closely regulated) public endeavors.  And I know just the place to start --taxpayer-funded universal single payer health care!

Wall Street socialism doesn't go far enough

Socialism?  Take it from Alex Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that celebrates free market capitalism :

"We're deep into socialism at the moment.  But when you're in the soup, you've got to take these actions even if it isn't something you'd normally want to do. The trick is, once you're out of the crisis, how do you get yourself out of these non-market measures?"

Excuse me while I giggle. 

But here's the problem from a progressive point of view.  The bailout of Wall Street's financial sector --the buying up of bad loans-- simply doesn't go far enough.  It's socialism alright, but socialism for the rich.  It does nothing for working class taxpayers and people who are being thrown out of their homes. 

Over the weekend Paul Krugman gave it some deep thought, and he says "no deal" to the Treasury bailout:

"... historically, financial system rescues have involved seizing the troubled institutions and guaranteeing their debts... . The feds took over S&Ls first, protecting their depositors, then transferred their bad assets to the RTC. The Swedes took over troubled banks, again protecting their depositors, before transferring their assets to their equivalent institutions."

That's closer to real socialism --the state seizing the (financial) means of production in order to benefit the little guys, the common people.  The Treasury plan seems to benefit only the fat cats.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says pretty much the same thing.  So does William Greider in The Nation.  Only he goes a little further: 

"If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims."

The way I see it, the swindle is thoroughly bi-partisan.  The Democrats take as much money from Wall Street as Republicans, or nearly as much anyway.  And don't forget --every Democratic legislator is rich and probably heavily invested in the "market".  So of course they're  eager to back the bailout. 

The Democrats are supposedly the party of the common man.  But when it comes to Wall Street, there is no common man. 

Glenn Greenwald describes the bailout in even harsher terms:

"We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded."

As I said, it's socialism for the rich.

How about a bailout for schools?

I'm no economist, but after reading the news about the massive government bailouts of the bankrupt titans of Wall Street --AIG is the latest-- to return confidence to the "markets", I can't help wondering if maybe, just maybe, the specter of socialism hasn't been embraced as the savior of raw, unbridled capitalism. 

How else to explain the proposed government acquisition of the bad loans crushing American investment banks?  Government intervention into the supposedly self-correcting free marketplace sounds like socialism to me. 

John McCain blames greed for the troubles on Wall Street.  He may as well have disavowed capitalism altogether, especially his favored deregulated capitalism.  Greed, after all, is good in a capitalistic economy.

Recent events also started me thinking about government's role in the broader economy.  If the Federal Reserve Bank can pump billions of dollars into the financial sector, and the U.S. Treasury Department can propose buying up those bad housing  loans, why can't the government do the same for floundering and underfunded schools? 

That's what Susan Sheppard wonders, too.  In a letter to the Oregonian's latest online experiment,  she writes:

"For decades the rallying cry of the 'fiscally conservative' anti-tax, anti-increased-school-funding pundits has been 'Schools should be run like businesses.'

"Well, now, I guess I agree." ...

"So, I say yes! Let's run schools like businesses -- as long as the
feds are there to bail them out when they fail."

Nobody has commented on her letter yet.  When they do, I can imagine the responses, angry and dismissive replies along the lines of "the schools don't need any more money!  They waste what they get now!"

Or, "The problems with schools are those greedy teachers and their unions.  Get rid of those unions!  More charter schools!  Drill baby drill!  Yeeaah!"

I digress.

Schools in Oregon in fact do need more money, and they have since Measure 5 kicked in in the early '90's.   Teachers and students understand that.  And so does Rich Watson.  In a comment to my recent post, The Missing Demographic,  he wrote:

"So no one will ever be able to convince me that financial support is not the main force for excellence in education. We need those science clubs, math clubs, chess clubs, music programs, language clubs, theatre clubs, etc. to occupy the spare time of our young people and give them an exposure to what they can accomplish. Schools do have the ability to fill in the gap caused by parental shortcomings, But somehow we have lost the will to provide it."

Media turns on McCain

No, not the hardbitten journalists from the "left-leaning" mainstream media.  The MSM still hasn't recovered from its swoon over the "straight talking" John McCain.

No.  The task of taking McCain to task for his endless prevaricating fell to the ladies of "The View", namely Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, and Whoopi Goldberg.

The best part of McCain's come-uppance was Whoopi Goldberg challenging McCain on his pledge to nominate "strict constructionists" to the Supreme Court (the best reason, by the way, to vote for Obama.)  Whoopi asked Mcain:

"Should I be worried about being a slave, returning to slavery?  Because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change."

Needless to say, that left McCain pretty much flummoxed.  

Now even the New York Times, media cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, has jumped into the fray, criticizing McCain for his appalling response to the second coming of the Great Depression.  For the Times, of course, the collapse of Wall Street is a local issue of the greatest importance. 

The Associated Press just came out with a piece calling McCain "two-faced".  And even the Washington Post (the other prominent pro-war media outlet) has an article up today describing McCain's hard-to-swallow transformation from diehard corporate deregulator to reform-minded re-regulator.

So with the media taking a decidedly anti-McCain turn, why is the presidential race so close?  Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution thinks he knows why, and he vows to punch Obama in the face if he manages to lose an election tailor-made for the Democrats:

OBAMA: Yes, I'm running for president, and we're witnessing the greatest financial implosion since the Great Depression. But I want to be absolutely clear about one thing: my opponent bears no responsibility.

BIDEN: Also, John McCain is a maverick POW and the greatest American who's ever lived! MCCAIN-PALIN 08!!!

That's why.

The missing demographic

I've long argued that student socioeconomic status and ethnicity are the two most important factor in determining which schools "succeed"  and which don't.  When it comes to test scores, a good school is a school with good students. 

What's a good student?  Good students are typically white, middle class, and relatively well-off.   On average, they score much higher on standardized tests than non-white and less advantaged students.  That's a given.  But here's the problem.

The feds and the state of Oregon with its school report cards wrongly assume that the schools, not the students, are responsible for those test scores.   That flawed assumption, leading to the labeling of schools as either "performing" or "non-performing", flows from the flawed premise that the schools must be doing something, either enough or too little, to produce high test scores.* 

It ain't necessarily so.  And that calls into question the entire academic rationale for school choice.

But there's another demographic variable that goes into the making of a good student, one that's rarely mentioned and never factored into school profiles.  The missing demographic is the degree to which parents are involved in the education of their children.  That crucial variable should be enough to convince anyone willing to think it through that "public" charter schools --and school choice generally-- will never adequately serve the needs of all public school students.

And isn't that what is demanded of a public school district? 

Why is the parent variable so important?  Simply because some parents will never muster the energy to fill out the applications and other paperwork necessary to take advantage of charter or other school choice options.  In fact, some parents may remain entirely unaware of the existence of such options.  

That's the reality underlying the Flynn-Blackmer finding that Portland's school transfer policy leaves many inner city schools more segregated by race and by income.

I don't oppose the concept of charter schools --cutting red tape, loosening the certification requirements for qualified instructors, and letting the school's staff set up an instructional approach appropriate for the students they serve.  If that's what charters are all about, I say lets remake all our neighborhood schools into charter schools. And do away with applications. 

Unfortunately, that's NOT the whole story with the charter school movement.  Too often charter schools are proposed by people who know little about education and are oblivious to the common good.  They see charter schools as a means of escaping low income, inner city neighborhood schools.

It's pointless to argue motives here, whether parents are racist or classist or elitist in opting for charter schools.  Or whether they are sincerely concerned about the lack of quality educational programs for their children in their local schools.

Motive ultimately doesn't matter.  The point is that many students are products of  dysfunctional families with uninvolved parents.  That's a public school reality.  As long as the charter option is available, public education will continue its devolution into a two-tiered system of schools for the elite --good students with involved parents-- and schools for everyone else --struggling students with disengaged parents.

Leaving those students behind is simply bad public policy. 

*(Some schools --usually elementary schools-- ARE successful in raising test scores. But raising test scores typically requires limiting curricular offerings in order to devote more time to literacy and numeracy.)

On earmarks and taxes

From my older brother, recently retired from the U.S. State Department:

"The total value of all earmarks in 2007 was $16 billion.  ...  The total U.S. budget was $3.1 trillion.  So, if there had been no earmarks, the budget would have been ... almost the same amount."

In other words it's a non-issue, or should be.  That still doesn't excuse the hypocrisy of the McCain ticket --or at least half the ticket-- for touting its crusade against earmarks while lobbying for them.

*******************************
McCain has falsely accused Obama of wanting to raise taxes.  Not so.  According to the Urban Institute, BOTH candidates will cut taxes:

"Both John McCain and Barack Obama have proposed tax plans that would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years... .  ... the Obama plan would cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018. McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion."

The difference is that Obama's somewhat smaller tax cuts target middle class wage earners, so they're fairer, from a progressive perspective, than McCain's cuts which favor the rich.

My brother thinks --and I agree-- that Obama should raise taxes to reduce the ever-growing national debt.

But you can't win an American election by running on platform of higher taxes.