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Category Archives: Critical Pedagogy

Economist Dr. Richard Wolff On Basic Economic Theory from a Comparative Perspective, as a Corrective for the Intellectual Dishonesty Built Into Most American Economics Curricula

24 Fri Feb 2017

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, Dr. Karl Marx (1818-1883), Education, Global Labour Movement, History of Economic Theory, Marxian Theory (Marxism), Philosophy of Education, Political Economy, Worker Self-Directed Enterprises

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Dr. Richard David Wolff (b. 1942), Economic Update, heterodox economics, Keynesian economics, KPFA, laissez faire, Lord John Maynard Keynes 1st Baron Keynes CB FBA (1883–1946), Lord Robert Skidelsky (b. 1939), Marxian economics, MMT, neoclassical economics, Pacifica Radio Network, Post-Keynesian economics, Robert Jacob Alexander Baron Skidelsky FBA (b. 1939), transcript, UMKC heterodox economics

usdayofrageLUMPENPROLETARIAT—On free speech radio’s Economic Update, host and heterodox economist, Dr. Richard D. Wolff discussed various economics topics, as he does every week.  And, this week, Dr. Wolff devoted the second half hour of the broadcast to breaking us out of the dominant ruling class/Wall Street paradigm of economics, which we are all force-fed in most economics textbooks in most American schools, colleges, and universities, and which permeates our newspapers, our radio, TV, and internet news reports.  Thankfully, there is more than one way to approach the economy and questions of economics.

The dominant version of economic theory (dominant, in terms of geographic footprint, not intellectual superiority), which saturates, at least, the English-speaking (and Western) world is known as neoclassical economics, which is merely one theoretical approach to economics.  By contrast, heterodox economics considers alternative approaches to economic theory and practice from a comparative perspective.  The New School (where Dr. Richard Wolff currently teaches) and the UMKC Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (where your author studied) are two examples of the few heterodox economics departments in the USA, which offer a comparative approach to economics.  Most economics departments around the nation are modeled after the conservative/neoclassical Chicago school of economics.  Indeed, the Chicago school has essentially colonised most economics departments around the nation and stifled alternative perspectives, such as Marxian economics (which has been suppressed and even criminalised), Keynesian economics (which has been co-opted by neoclassical economics), Post-Keynesian economics (which has sought to remain true to the original spirit of Keynes‘ work), and institutional economics (which has sought alternative ways of viewing the economy, from broader perspectives beyond simply money, business, finance, and trade).

As a result of the stifling hegemony of neoclassical economics, the field of economics has been rendered deliberately abstruse, opaque, dull and uninteresting, and completely removed from all human/social context by an overly mathematised and rigid adherence to neoclassical assumptions.  The interesting professors of economics employ a comparative approach and make real-world connections, such as Dr. John Henry, who taught us at UMKC, among other things, about the History of Economic Theory (or, somewhat derogatorily, the History of Economic Thought) as well as microeconomic analysis.  Another interesting, indeed awesome, UMKC professor of economics was Dr. Fred Lee, who was respected for his level of knowledge and vast reading.  Dr. Fred Lee was always one of my favorite participants at UMKC economics presentations because he didn’t mince words and he always called it like he saw it.  He was very outspoken and very passionate about heterodox economics and socioeconomic justice.  Indeed, if memory serves me, Dr. Lee coined the name heterodox economics.  For economics professors, who are not confined within neoclassical dogma, economic theory must always be first and foremost descriptive before prescriptive.  Notably, Dr. Henry also taught Post-Keynesian economist Dr. Stephanie Kelton, who continues to teach the world, as do other MMT advocates, how our money system works and why the government can afford to spend for public purpose, such as effectively ending involuntary unemployment through an MMT-based job guarantee programme.

It’s a shame that the American people are not taught to understand their own economy and economic system, or how the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans locks in place a capitalist system, which is misunderstood and confounded by myths, perpetuated by bad, or narrow and dogmatic, economics curricula.  But our U.S. Constitution encourages us to speak freely and for each one to teach one, and to help our neighbors survive and prosper.  That’s where the politics of education come in, which might involve base human drives, such as ego and greed, but also altruism and a deeper underlying philosophy of education.  Even Pope Francis uttered a few years ago, “Injustice is not invincible.”  To help us better understand our world, Dr. Richard Wolff disabuses us of many harmful myths regarding our economy, economics and economic theory, and how those economic myths harm our working class lives. [1]  Listen (and/or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Economic Update.]

Economic UpdateECONOMIC UPDATE—[24 FEB 2017]

[A critique of the working conditions and pay scales of so-called ‘adjunct’ professors at post-secondary educational institutions.]

[KPFA paid-staff member Mitch Jeserich appeals for KPFA listener-sponsorship, membership, and support in the context of KPFA’s Winter Fund Drive (February 2017).]

[A brief comparative analysis of wealth inequality around the world.]

[KPFA paid-staff member Mitch Jeserich appeals for KPFA listener-sponsorship, membership, and support in the context of KPFA’s Winter Fund Drive (February 2017).]  (c. 31:51)

On basic economic theory, from a comparative perspective.

DR. RICHARD WOLFF:  “Okay.  Much of the time, that remains for me today, is going to be used to talk about economic theory.  Don’t worry.  This is not gonna be an abstruse lesson of the sort you might get in a bad class in a bad school.  I’m gonna try to make it clear.  And I’m gonna try to make it interesting.  But we have to deal with this.  (c. 31:58)

“Economics is not like fixing a car.  If you wanna fix a car, you go to a place where they teach you:

This is the carburetor. This is the engine. This is how it works. This is how it breaks down. And this is how you fix it, when it breaks down, so that it works again.

“Things are kind of understood.  They’re fairly universal, car engines being what they are.  And, so, you can become a mechanic and a skilled worker by learning how the engine is put together, what goes wrong, and how to fix it.  Economics is not like that.  (c. 32:56)

“What do I mean?  The economy is part of the mystery of how human beings interact with one another.  You know other parts of that mystery because we all confront those mysteries.

Why do I find that person attractive, rather than the other one?

Why did I marry him, or her, rather than that other one?

Why am I friends with this person, but not with the other one?

“These are mysteries of relationships.  And we spend much of our time trying to figure them out.  And we make progress.  We learn how or why, at least part of how or why we [for example] marry the way we do, and we have friendships the way we do, and this job works for us, and that one doesn’t, and this neighborhood is attractive, and that one isn’t, etcetera.  (c. 33:47)

“Well, the economy is like that.  We don’t experience the economy in the same way.  If you are the head of a big corporation, you do not experience the economy in the same way, that a person does, who drives a truck.  If you’re a farmer, you do not experience the economy the way you do, if you’re an office worker.  You don’t.  And that’s not a fault or a failure.  That’s the way the world is.

“But it’s even more complicated.  If you were educated in certain ways, you were taught to think about the economy in certain ways.  And if someone else taught you with a very different approach, then you learned that approach.  It turns out that economic systems are understood, and experienced, differently by different people.  And it has always been that way, just like human beings understand love, sex, friendship, and all the other relationships in life in very different ways.  And, indeed, one of the fascinating and interesting things about life is to encounter, to discover other ways of looking at the world.  It will change us.

“If I look at it one way, and I encounter a person, who looks at it in a different [way], my perspective will be changed.  I will now be more sensitive.  I will understand, even if I don’t agree with other ways of thinking about the world.  It’s a little bit like discovering that there are other kinds of food preparation, than the one you grew up with.  You don’t have to like them as well; but they’re interesting; they’re tasty.  From time to time, you would like to taste it again.  So, here in New York, one restaurant offers sushi and one restaurant Tex-Mex and another restaurant Chinese food and so on.  And people in New York love that about this city, that you can literally go to a different corner of the world whenever you want to taste how differently human beings have understood the relationship between us and the food we eat.  (c. 36:08)

“So, let’s do the economics.  How do we get into it?  Well, I give that a lot of thought because, when I teach economics, I teach it in what we call a comparative perspective.  I don’t teach economics as if it were carburetor or car engine studies.  The economy isn’t a thing, that it works in this and this way, that we can learn and figure out how to fix.  That makes economics boring, mechanical, and technical, when what is exciting about it is precisely how differently [for example] people eat.  Imagine, if I gave you a course about food, and all I talked about was how you cook the hamburger, here’s how you cook the french fries, and, therefore, here’s how you make food.  Eventually, you’d figure out that that isn’t about food.  That’s about one kind of food.  And you don’t want to be limited to just that kind.  You want to, at least, know what the other ones are. (c. 37:19)

“It would be as if I taught you a course on religion, but the only religion I told you about was, let’s say, uh, Unitarian Universalist religion.  After a while, you’d say to me:  Look, I’m perfectly happy learning about Unitarians and Universalists. But aren’t there other religions, too? Like Roman Catholicism or Muslim religion or Jewish religion? Or and-so-on-and-so-on?  You want to understand that people engage with divinity, God, the spiritual, if you like, in different ways, just like they engage with food in different ways.  Well, friends, your education is narrow, stunted, and inadequate, if you think economics is one way to go.  (c. 38:10)

“Now, why do I stress that?  Because that’s how it’s taught in the United States.  And that’s how it’s been taught for most of the last 50 years.  We do not admit to most of our students in most of our colleges and universities that there are alternative ways of understanding what an economy is, how it works, what’s wrong with it, and how to fix it.  There are multiple ways of doing that, just like there are multiple ways of dancing or singing or eating or dressing or praying or anything else, particularly anything else that really matters in life.  And our economy matters, just like our eating matters and our religions matter and so on.  (c. 38:57)

“So, I am now, in the time that I have, going to try to address the different ways you can understand the economy.  One last reason, before I do it, why: because economics has been so narrowly taught in the United States, because only one way of thinking about it dominates almost to the exclusion—not quite, but almost to the exclusion—of other ways.  Our economic leadership in companies, in the government, has been poor.

“We have had, for example, [an economic] crash in 1929, a terrible [economic] crash, that gave us [an economic] depression—that’s what it’s called—that lasted eleven years, roughly, from ’29 to ’41.  One of the reasons we had that terrible crash is we didn’t have the insight, the understanding, to see it coming.  We didn’t understand, once it came, why it was there.  And we didn’t understand real well what to do about it, which is why it lasted eleven horrible years.

“And did we, at least, learn after that?  Not really very well. [3]  The narrowness of our economics prevented us from asking, and answering, crucial questions.  And that’s part of the reason why, in 2008, capitalism in the United States and beyond crashed again.  And, once again, the profession didn’t see it coming. [4]  And, once again, when it hit, they didn’t understand why.  And, once again, they couldn’t fix it, which is why here we are, eight years, nine years later, in 2017, a crash that happened in 2008, and we’re still, most of us, living with the consequences, the terribly damaging consequences.  That should have been more than enough evidence to suggest that the way we were teaching, studying, learning, and using economics was inadequate, was too narrow, missed too much.  But it didn’t.

“It didn’t.  And that’s because there are reasons why we teach what we teach, even though it doesn’t work very well.  A dangerous way to run your society.  But it’s the one, that has dominated in our society.”  (c. 41:38)

[KPFA paid-staff member Mitch Jeserich appeals for KPFA listener-sponsorship, membership, and support in the context of KPFA’s Winter Fund Drive (February 2017).] (c. 43:18)

DR. RICHARD WOLFF:  “So, what is that way?  [What is that single, narrow, way in which economics is taught at most schools, colleges, and universities in the United States?]  It’s called neoclassical economics.  We don’t have enough time to go into why it has this funny name.  But it does.  That’s a matter of the history of how it arose.  And, in this view, capitalism is a magnificent economic system.  Neoclassical economics is not neutral about capitalism.  It loves capitalism.  It doesn’t just love capitalism.  But it loves a particular kind of capitalism; it’s the kind with very little government intervention in the economy. [5]  Indeed, from a neoclassical perspective:

All we want from the government is to make sure that nobody interferes with this beautiful system called capitalism, a system, which is perfect, which rewards everybody in proportion to what they contribute.  If you’re rich it’s ‘cos you contributed a lot.  If you’re poor, it’s because you haven’t.

“It’s very morally loaded this way.

It’s a system, in which what gets produced is what everybody wants.  So, it’s kind of fair.  It’s kind of responsive.  It’s consumer-oriented, if you like that language.  It’s a system, that’s self-healing.  If anything goes wrong, it fixes itself.  You don’t need the government to come in.  You just let it be. [6]  Let the private individual buy and sell—buy the goods and services, that he or she wants—sell whatever they have to contribute to production, their labour (if that’s all they have) or some capital (if they have some wealth) or their land (if they own some).  You contribute what you wish and have.  And you get in proportion to what you contribute.  Fairsies, you might call it.  A wonderful system, that is the best way to organise an economy, that the world has ever achieved.  And, therefore, it should be celebrated, which is what neoclassical economics does.  And it should not be interfered with, which is the message, that neoclassical economics gives to the journalists, who write about the economy, to the politicians, that run the government, and to the leaders, who own and operate the enterprise.  (c. 45:50)

Neoclassical teaches: The private economy is what should dominate, is the best thing, that could happen, should be left alone, and works perfectly.  Nobody has anything to complain about.  Your income is your reward for what you contribute.  Don’t complain.  If you want more, contribute more.  And, if you don’t have more to contribute—you don’t have more labour you could do; if you don’t have more capital, you could offer; if you don’t have more land, you could make available—then, it’s your fault.  And you have to live with whatever rewards you get for what contribution you make.  (c. 46:26)

“This [i.e., neoclassical economics, or pro-capitalist dogma] is a celebratory system.  This is what is taught in American colleges and universities 95% of the time.  5%, not quite.  I’m gonna get to that in a minute.  But this is what is taught.  Therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised that journalists, when they write about economics, write as if we live in this wonderful system, that works really beautifully; and that the government should keep its hands off; and nobody should break the rules; and, if there’s a problem, the market, the system will solve it itself.

“And you shouldn’t be surprised if corporate leaders love this because it says they’re in charge of an enterprise, which can do everything it wants.  The government is not gonna interfere because that would only make things bad.  This is what the people, who run the society, want.  Politicians are told to think like this.  That’s why you can hear politicians so often saying these weird things, like:

Let the market decide.

Let the private enterprise system work its way out.

“These [neoclassicals or capitalists] are people, who believe this [economic mythology].  And, after all, they were taught it over and over again.  They got it from their newspapers and TV.  They get it from their political leaders.  Of course, they believe it.  (c. 47:47)

“But is this the only way to look at the economy?  And the answer is an absolute, unqualified, no, no, no.

“To imagine that this is the only way to understand an economy is the same thing as imagining that the only way to have a meal is to eat hamburgers and french fries, or the only way to pray is in the manner of the Unitarians and Universalists.  It is to misunderstand a part of the story for the whole story.  And that does you no service and is no complement to your smarts.  (c. 48:26)

GrantKeynes“So, here we go.  Here’s the first alternative [to neoclassical economic theory or capitalist ideology].  The first alternative is called Keynesian economics [7], named after John Maynard Keynes, a British economics professor at Cambridge University, who in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s looked around him and said:

I see a quarter of the people unemployed.  I see poverty and misery all around me.  Don’t tell me capitalism is a wonderful system, that works beautifully, that produces wealth, prosperity, economic growth, that gives everybody what they deserve.  Stop it!  You’re describing an economy, that may be a utopian dream you may have.  But it does not describe and, therefore, it is not gonna help us fix an economy, that is clearly not working well.

“This was a bombshell for many.  This was a man, John Maynard Keynes, who had been an accomplished practitioner of neoclassical economics, but who was realistic about what he saw in the Britain of his time, which was as devastated by the Great Depression as the United States was.  And he said:

Capitalism, private enterprise, markets, left to themselves can and, here, clearly have produced social and economic disasters, crashes, poverty, unemployment, misery, inequality, economic instability.

“Should I go on?  And Mr. Keynes didn’t waste a minute.  He developed an explanation for how private enterprise capitalism can produce these disasters and what should be done about it.  And, to make a long story short, he said there were mechanisms, normal and natural to capitalism, that could and regularly would produce economic horror stories, disasters, failures, miseries, inefficiencies, depressions.  And the solution, he said, was for the government to step in.  Systematically, the government should pump money into the economy when it turned down to build it up again, that the government should, when the private sector wasn’t spending enough money to keep people in their jobs working and producing, well, then, the government should step in.  It didn’t even matter to Keynes.  (c. 51:15)

Buy anything you want.  Take in each other’s laundry.  Build national parks.  Do whatever it is, that has to be done.  Keep people working by having the government buy whatever it thinks might be useful to build.  But the government has to come in, otherwise capitalism self-destructs.

“This is a very different economic theory.  Most schools in the United States don’t teach it.  And, if they do teach it, they have one or two faculty doing that, everybody else is parroting the old neoclassical song and dance.  But is Keynesian the only alternative?  Not at all.  (c. 51:58)

marx_and_engels“The third big one: Marxian economics.  And here’s the big difference about it.  Neoclassical economics celebrates private capitalism.  Keynesian economics says private capitalism is good, but only if it’s controlled, regulated, supplemented by government intervention.  Otherwise, the bad parts of it drown out the good parts of it.  But Keynesian economics likes capitalism.  It just likes it with a heavy dose of government involvement, which freaks out the neoclassicals, who don’t want any government.  And, so, that’s been the debate between them—more or less government, more or less government intervention.  (c. 52:35)

“Marxian economics: completely different.  For Marxian economics, the problem isn’t more or less government.  The problem is capitalism, itself.  This system of organising production, so that a tiny group of people at the top, the board of directors, make all the decisions; and the mass of employees do what their told.  That, for Marxists, is the problem.  You have an undemocratic economic system.  And it undermines democracy everywhere else.  You have a system, that gives a small number of people the dominant say.  They’ll make the system work for them and not for everybody else.  And that’s why you get the inequality, that we talked about in the first half of today’s programme. (c. 53:24)

“No, no, no.  The Marxian argument is:

You have to change the economic system at the foundation. You have to, finally, bring democracy to the workplace.  All the workers together, collectively and democratically, decide what happens in the enterprise, not a handful of shareholders, not a handful of board of directors elected by the shareholders.  No, no, no.

The autocracy, the non-representative nature of the leadership of enterprises, that’s the core problem.  And that has to be fixed.  Otherwise, you will have recessions and depressions and crashes.  The government coming in, as Mr. Keynes proposed, wasn’t enough to stop us from having another crash in 2008, not having learned what the Marxists want us to see, which is the Crash of the 1930s was also a problem of the underlying system.

“Why would a country like ours be this way?  Why would we continue to teach one way of thinking, when it hasn’t worked real well and the alternatives are obvious?  And the answer is: fear.

“For 50 years, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union made Americans fearful about the Soviet Union.  It talked about Marxism.  So, they [i.e., the Americans] didn’t want to talk about that at all.  If you talked about it, you lost your career; you lost your job; you were in trouble.  A little bit like James Joyce trying to write his novel.  He was censored.  You were pushed away.  It’s a tragedy.  It’s intellectually dishonest.  It’s a tragedy for our country.  We need all the insights and all the theoretical avenues available to our people to solve our problems.  Shutting us out of two of the three major theories in the world today is self-destructive.  It’s only done to fearfully support the status quo, what the corporations now like.

They are not the problem.  It’s the government intervention.  It’s this.  It’s something else.  It’s immigrants.  But it’s not the system, itself.

“Thank you for your attention.  Thank you for your partnership.  I look forward to speaking with you again next week.”  (c. 55:53)

[Economic Update theme music comes in momentarily]

[KPFA paid-staff member Mitch Jeserich, then, closed out the broadcast with appeals for KPFA listener-sponsorship, membership, and support in the context of KPFA’s Winter Fund Drive (February 2017).]

[snip] (c. 59:59)

Learn more at ECONOMIC UPDATE.

***

[1]  Unfortunately, Dr. Richard Wolff seems to perpetuate at least one myth, the myth that federal taxes pay for federal government spending.  Dr. Wolff seems to deliberately avoid informing the public about MMT.

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Economic Update, this one-hour broadcast hosted by Dr. Richard Wolff, Friday, 24 FEB 2017, 10:00 PST.

[3]  After the Great Depression of the 1930s, which was triggered by the economic crash of 1929, Keynesian policies prevailed, which involved increased government interventions to attempt to stabilise the economy.  These economic reforms, however, meant reductions in the extreme wealth accumulation of the ruling classes.  In other words economic reforms, in the context of economic collapse, invariably mean restraints on unbridled financial, business, and labour relations; and such restraints are restraints on capitalism, which are restraints on profit motive.  The ruling classes prefer inequality because obscene wealth depends on obscene poverty.  As the celebrated abolitionist (and former slave) Frederick Douglass presciently articulated:

Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

During the mid-20th century, ruling class elites, with their well-funded think tanks and connections, eventually managed to undermine Keynesian reforms and usher in a conservative backlash to progressive politics.  By the late 1970s, neoclassical economics struck back in the forms of right-wing elections of President Ronald Reagan (in the USA) and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (in the UK).  Then, we saw the rise of Wall Street, reflected in Oliver Stone’s 1987 blockbuster movie.  At the same time as neoclassical economics was restoring and galvanising its stifling hegemony over the discipline of economics, the ostensibly liberal, or progressive, Democratic Party (USA) was effectively co-opting labour unions and turning them into ‘Gomperist’ business unions.  Such unions today, which are most unions, narrowly focus on individual work site issues, shirk their working class solidarity, and ignore broader societal and political issues, whilst remaining predominantly loyal to the Democratic Party, despite the Democratic Party’s unresponsiveness to working class issues.  Indeed, unions have even lost their legal right to engage in wildcat strikes or general strikes, especially since the passage of the anti-labour Taft-Hartley Act, which labour leaders called the “slave labour bill“.  Even President Truman had to admit that the anti-labour Taft-Hartley Act was a “dangerous intrusion on free speech”, which would “conflict with important principles of our democratic society.”

Today, the fire of organised labour is almost entirely extinguished in the USA; and it poses no political resistance to the anti-working class abuses of capitalism.  And heterodox economics has lost almost all influence in American government and institutions.  Dr. Stephanie Kelton (former chair of the Economics Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, or UMKC, and one of your author’s former economics professors) is an exception, as she was hired by Senator Bernie Sanders to work as chief economist, first, in the Senate Minority Budget Committee, then, on his campaign trail.  Unfortunately, Bernie Sanders wasn’t as courageous as FDR was in backing economic reforms to remedy the economic hazards of capitalism.  If Bernie Sanders had been courageous, he would have allowed Dr. Stephanie Kelton to lend her expertise on the campaign trail to explain to the American people, for example, how an MMT-based job guarantee programme could provide real jobs to a faltering economy, stimulate a depressed economy, and even end involuntary unemployment as we know it.  The ideas are out there, only they are being suppressed, not only by the corporate media, but even, apparently, by the cowardice of our ostensible political heroes.  (Even Dr. Richard Wolff seems to refuse to speak honestly about MMT, or even mention it.  He continues, for example, to perpetuate the economic myth that taxes pay for federal government spending, as if the USA’s monetary system (or money system) were still on the gold standard.  It’s impossible to imagine that Dr. Wolff isn’t informed about MMT, as he is personal friends with faculty members at UMKC.  But, then, who knows?  We’ll have to reach out to him and ask.)

As far as economists not having had the foresight to see the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 coming down the pike, as Dr. Richard Wolff points out, we observe that heterodox economists, such as Dr. Hyman Minsky, did provide very cogent analyses and clear warnings of the cyclical economic disasters, which are produced by capitalist modes of production.  For example, see Dr. Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, in which Minsky argued that a key mechanism, which pushes an economy towards crisis is the accumulation of debt by the non-government sector.  Minsky identified three types of borrowers, which contribute to the accumulation of insolvent debt: hedge borrowers, speculative borrowers, and Ponzi borrowers.  As one of my UMKC economics professors, Dr. L. Randall Wray (himself, a graduate student of Dr. Hyman Minsky) taught us, the only thing, which prevented Dr. Minsky from a more accurate prediction of the Global Financial Crisis, was that nobody counted on such a high degree of creativity, which the financial sector would engage in to extend the Ponzi phase of the so-called business cycle.

We can also look back to the work of heterodox economist Dr. Abba Lerner and his theory of functional finance, which is based on effective demand principles and chartalism.  It states that government should finance itself to meet explicit goals, such as taming the so-called business cycle, achieving full employment, ensuring economic growth, and low inflation.

Lerner’s ideas were most heavily in use during the Post-World War II economic expansion, when they became the basis for most textbook presentations of Keynesian economics and the basis for policy.  Thus, when Keynesian policy came under fire in the late ’60s and early ’70s, it was Lerner’s idea of functional finance, which most people were attacking.  During the post-war period, U.S. unemployment reached a low of 2.9% in 1953 when the inflation rate averaged at 1.1%.

Other economists, such as Dr. L. Randall Wray (UMKC), Dr. Michael Hudson (UMKC), and others have also written critically about the inevitable economic boom-and-crash cycles, which result in widening inequality and worsened economic instability.  What all economists, left of center, agree on is the fact that capitalism demands, at the very least, strong government interventions to prevent mass unemployment and economic misery.  That is the opposite of the laissez faire, or let it be, approach of neoclassical, or free market fundamentalist, economics.  The more radical economists admit, as Dr. Michael Hudson often does, that all economies are planned.  That means that capitalist economic crises are expected and allowed to happen, such as the USA’s subprime mortgage crisis, which caused millions of people to lose their homes, their jobs, and their life savings, but which allowed bankers and profiteers to capture a greater share of wealth.  It’s true, all economies are planned, as Dr. Hudson reminds us, the only questions are:  Will the economy be planned by private for-profit banks and Wall Street for ruling class interests?  Or will the economy be planned by Main Street for working class interests?

[4]  Again, we recall exceptions to the general rule that economists didn’t see the Global Financial Crisis coming, such as Dr. Hyman Minsky and the relevance of his work around financial theory.  In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s, The New Yorker labelled the subprime mortgage crisis “the Minsky Moment“.

[5]  Again, here we come to the neoclassical economic principle of laissez-faire economics, which ostensibly argues for very little government intervention in the economy.  Of course, this is only a symbolic principle on the part of neoclassical economists.  They don’t really mean laissez-faire.

To wave the banner of laissez-faire economics, or free market economics, is to make it easier for neoclassical economics to saturate the minds of the public and popular notions about economics.  The unassuming non-economist will readily associate popular buzz words, such as free market and the invisible hand and laissez faire capitalism, with notions of liberty and freedom, if only freedom to choose what one can afford.  But, in actuality, this politically conservative economic principle of laissez-faire economics, where the government is supposed to stay out of the economy, really, is only meant to apply to government interventions, which may help or improve working class interests.  As we saw with the huge government bail-outs of Wall Street interests in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, making insolvent institutions whole again, resuscitating them to life as zombie banks.  So, what is actually meant by laissez-faire economics is: no government interventions on behalf of the working classes, only for the capitalist asset-owning classes.

It’s important to keep in mind that, when we hear pro-capitalist arguments about keeping the government out of the economy, we cannot overlook the many ways in which government intervenes to safeguard the interests of the ruling capitalist classes.

[6]  Dr. Richard Wolff uses the words, let it be, which is a common American translation of laissez-faire, as in laissez-faire economics, or neoclassical economics.  Laissez-faire is an alternative spelling of the French, laissez faire, which means let it be or leave it be, or which literally translates to let do.

[7]  Students of economics will find, today, that Keynesian economics has been largely supplanted by Post-Keynesian economics, at least at the leading edge of heterodox economics.  As economic historian Lord Robert Skidelsky (whom your author has met occasionally around the UMKC campus as well as attended his presentations) argues, the post-Keynesian school has remained closest to the spirit of Keynes’ original work.  Lord Skidelsky, a British economic historian of Russian origin, is the author of a major, award-winning, three-volume biography of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946).  Lord Skidelsky is, perhaps, the most authoritative biographer of Keynes.

***

[1 MAR 2017]

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America at War with Itself (2016) by Dr. Henry A. Giroux

14 Fri Oct 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Fascism, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, Education, First Amendment (U.S. Constitution), Free Speech, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Philosophy of Education, Political Economy, Political Science, Sociology

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"What Did You Learn In School Today?", ACLU, Ajamu Baraka, Albert Camus (1913-1960), Amy Goodman (b. 1957), Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation (2010), Central Park Five, curriculum theory, David Talbot (b. 1951), Democracy Now!, Donald John Trump (b. 1946), Doug Henwood, Dr. Henry A. Giroux (b. 1943), Dr. Jill Stein, education theory, HRW, incompatibility between democracy and capitalism, Juan González (b. 1947), junk food news, KPFA, Manuel Zelaya, neoliberalism, news abuse, Pacifica Radio Network, Peter Schweizer, political imagination, school choice, The Washington Post, transcript

girouxamericaatwarwithitselfoct2016LUMPENPROLETARIAT—Educator and leading theorist of critical pedagogy, Dr. Henry Giroux has published a new book entitled America At War With Itself.

Free speech radio’s Democracy Now! has been good enough to feature a brief interview with Dr. Giroux during today’s broadcast. [1]  Primary host Amy Goodman assured her audience this brief interview was only the beginning.  Listen/view (and/or download) here. [2]

Messina

***

[Working draft transcript of actual radio broadcast by Messina for Lumpenproletariat and Pacifica Radio.]

DEMOCRACY NOW!—[14 OCT 2016]  “From Pacifica, this is Democracy Now!.

YUSEF SALAAM:  “I really didn’t know anything about Donald Trump until he took out those ads and called for our execution.  Every time I think about that, I think, had this been the 1950s, we would’ve been modern-day Emmett Tills.  They had our names, our phone numbers, and addresses in the papers.  And, so, what would’ve happened, if somebody from the darkest places of society would’ve come to our homes, kicked in our doors, and drug us from our homes, and hung us from the trees in Central Park?  That would’ve been the type of mob justice, that they were seeking.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “In 1989, Yusef Salaam and four other African-American and Latino teenagers were arrested for beating and raping a white woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park.  They became known as the Central Park Five.

“Donald Trump took out full-page ads at four New York newspapers calling for their execution.

“Then, in 2002, their convictions were vacated after the real rapist came forward, confessed to the crime.  His DNA matched.

“The Central Park Five served between 7 and 13 years in jail each for the assault.

“New York City, ultimately, settled with them for $41 million dollars.  But, as late as last week, Donald Trump still claimed they were guilty.

“We’ll speak with Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five.  He recently wrote in the Washington Post: Donald Trump won’t leave me alone.

“Then, a new report documents the devastating harm of policies, that criminalise the personal use and possession of drugs.”

FILM CLIP:  “Every 25 seconds, someone is arrested in the United States simply for possessing drugs for their personal use.  Around the country, police make more arrests for drug possession than for any other kind—over 1.25 million arrests per year.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union released the findings Wednesday with a call for a call for states and the federal government to decriminalise low-level drug offences.

“And, from poisoned water in Flint to the police deaths of African-Americans to hatemongering on the presidential campaign trail, is America at war with itself?

“We’ll speak with Professor Henry Giroux, who argues just that in his new book.  All that and more, coming up.”  (c. 2:35)

[Democracy Now! News Headlines omitted by scribe.  Read, or ‘watch’, them here.]

AMY GOODMAN:  “And those are some of the headlines.  This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman.” (c. 13:09)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And I’m Juan González.  Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers around the country and around the world.

“And, Amy, before we get to the rest of the show, I wanted to ask you.  You’re heading back to North Dakota to answer the charges, that were lodged against you in connection to the Labor Day Weekend protests over the Dakota Access pipeline.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “That’s right, our filming of them.  I’m going back to North Dakota to cover the ongoing standoff at Standing Rock with the Democracy Now! team.  I’ll be turning myself in to authorities at the Morton County Jail in North Dakota Monday morning [17 OCT 2016], 8am, North Dakota time—that’s 9am here—as a result of being charged by the state of North Dakota with criminal trespass, following the release of our video showing the Dakota Access pipeline security guards physically assaulting, non-violent, mainly Native American land protectors, pepper-spraying them and unleashing attack dogs.  (c. 14:05)

“I intend to vigorously fight the charge, as I see it as a direct attack on the First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know.  The prosecutor in the case say [sic] he may, actually, uh, add more charges.  Uh, so, we will see.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, hopefully, reason will prevail on Monday with the authorities there.  But we’ll be watching it, definitely.  And best of luck to you.”  (c. 14:29)

[Central Park Five segment omitted by scribe.  Access the news story here.]  (c. 32:14) [3]

[Music break, interrupted by local KPFA announcements:  Dr. Ralph Nader book event, Breaking Through Power Is Easier Than You Think, on Monday, October 17th, 2016, at 7:30pm at St. John’s Presbyterian Church (2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA).]  (c. 33:30)

[Pete Seeger music break continues] (c. 33:33)

AMY GOODMAN:  “Pete Seeger, ‘What Did You Learn In School Today?‘  This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman.”

[ACLU & HRW report calling for drug decriminalisation segment omitted by scribe.  Access the news story here.]  (c. 45:37)

[Music break, interrupted by local KPFA announcement:  author David Talbot will join author Chris Hedges, Unspeakable, book event, Wednesday, October 19th, at 7:30pm at King Middle School (1781 Rose Street, Berkeley, CA); Wednesday, October 19, 2016, Pacifica coverage of the final presidential debate.]  (c. 46:55)

[Elliot & The Ghost music break continues]

AMY GOODMAN:  “‘Turn Off Your Radar‘, Elliot & The Ghost, whose bandmember, Brett Giroux, is the son of our next guest.   This is Democracy Now!, DemocracyNow.org, the War and Peace Report.  I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González.”  (c. 47:07)

rigged 2016JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, we end today’s show with a look at a new book, that argues America is at war with itself.  From poisoned water in Flint and other cities to the police deaths of African Americans, including Keith Lamont Scott, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, to hatemongering on the presidential campaign trail, Henry Giroux critiques what he believes is a slide toward authoritarianism and other failings, that led to the current political climate.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Noted scholar Robin D.G. Kelley writes in the book’s foreword, quote:

“‘These are, indeed, dark times.  But they are dark, not merely because we are living in an era of vast inequality, mass incarceration, and crass materialism, or that we face an increasingly precarious future, they are dark because most Americans are living under a cloak of ignorance, a cultivated and imposed state of civic illiteracy, that has opened the gates for what Giroux correctly sees as an authoritarian turn in the United States.  These are dark times because the very fate of democracy is at stake—a democracy fragile from its birth, always battered on the shoals of racism, patriarchy, and class rule.’

“‘The rise of Donald J. Trump is a sign of the times,’ he writes.

“Well, for more, we’re joined by the author of America at War with Itself, Henry Giroux, MccMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest.  He joins us in New York City.

“We welcome you.  It’s great to have you with us.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I’m honoured.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “How is America at war with itself?” [4]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “It’s at war with itself because it’s basically declared war, not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it’s declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. [5]  And we see it with the war on public schools.  We see it with the war on education.  We see it with the war on the healthcare system.  We see it, as you said earlier, with the war on dissent, on the First Amendment.  We see it in the war on women’s reproductive rights. (c. 48:57)

“But, we, especially see it with the war on youth.  I mean, it seems to me that you can measure any degree—any society’s insistence on how it takes democracy seriously can, in fact, be measured by the way it treats its children.  And if we take that index as a measure of the United States, it’s utterly failing.  You have young people basically who—in schools, that are increasingly modeled after prisons—you have their behavior being increasingly criminalised.  And, one of the most atrocious of all acts, you have the rise of debtors’ prisons for children.  Kids, who basically are truant from school, are being fined.  And if they can’t—their parents can’t pay the fine, they’re being put in jail.  You have kids whose every behavior is being criminalised.

“I mean, what does it mean to be in a public school, and all of a sudden you are engaged in a dress code violation, and the police come in, and they handcuff you? They take you out; they put you in a police car, put you in the criminal justice system, and all of a sudden you find yourself, as Tess was saying earlier, marked for life.  Entire families are being destroyed around this. (c. 49:57)

“So—but it seems to me the real question here is:  How do you understand these isolated incidents within a larger set of categories, that tell us exactly what’s happening? [6]  And what’s happening is the social state is being destroyed, and the punishing state is taking its place.  So, violence now becomes the only tool by which we can actually mediate social problems, that should be dealt with in very different ways.”  (c. 50:20)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Well, you devote an entire chapter to Donald Trump’s America.” [7]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And you, specifically, talk about the—how the media coverage of Trump has sort of divorced him from any past history of the country, in terms of the development of right-wing demagogues and authoritarian figures.” [7]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “That’s an important question.  I mean, you live in a country marked by a culture of the immediate.  You live in a country, that’s marked by celebrity culture, you know, that basically infantilises people, paralyses them.  It eliminates all notions of civic literacy, turns the school into bastions of ignorance.  They completely kill the radical imagination in any fundamental way.”

“And I think that what often happens with Trump is that you see something utterly symptomatic of the decline of a formative culture that makes democracy possible.  Juan, you have to have informed citizens to have a democracy.  You don’t have an informed citizenry.  You don’t have people who can think.  Remember what Hannah Arendt said when she was talking about fascism and totalitarianism.  She said:  Thoughtlessness is the essence of totalitarianism.  So, all of a sudden, emotion becomes more important than reason.  Ignorance becomes more important than justice.  Injustice is looked over as simply something, that happens on television.  The spectacle of violence takes over everything. (c. 51:34)

“I mean so it seems to me that we make a terrible mistake in talking about Trump as some kind of essence of evil. [8]  Trump is symptomatic of something much deeper in the culture, whether we’re talking about the militarisation of everyday life, whether we’re talking about the criminalisation of social problems, or whether we’re talking about the way in which money has absolutely corrupted politics.  This is a country that is sliding into authoritarianism. [9]  I mean it is not a—you cannot call this a democracy anymore.  We make a terrible mistake when we equate capitalism with democracy. [10]  And—” [Amy Goodman’s voice overlaps/interrupts]

AMY GOODMAN:  “You, you talk about the ethical bankruptcy of the U.S. ruling elites paving the way for Donald Trump.” [7]  (c. 52:11)

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “You know, you live in a country in which we have separated all economic activity from social cost, from ethical considerations. [10]  The ethical imagination, in itself, has become a liability.  And I think that when people like you and others make that clear—that you can’t have a democracy without that kind of ethical intervention, without assessing, you know, the degree to which people in some way can believe in the public good, can believe in justice—you have the heavy hand of the law pouncing on you.

“And I think that when the radical imagination dies, when an ethical sensibility dies, you live in a state of terrorism; you live in a state of fear; you live in a state in which people can’t trust each other.  Shared fears become more important than shared responsibilities.  And that’s the essence of fascism.” (c. 52:51)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And what sign of hope do you see out of all this, uh—yeah—” [Dr. Henry Giroux’s voice overlaps/interrupts]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “I think there are a lot of signs.  And thank you for the question.  I mean, I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilising around different issues, in which they’re doing something, that I haven’t seen for a long time.  And that is, they’re linking these issues together.  You can’t talk about police violence without talking about the militarisation of society, in general.  You can’t talk about the assault on public education, unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods.  You can’t talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism.  You can’t do that.  They’re making those connections. [6]  (c. 53:27)

“But they’re doing something more: They’re linking up with other groups.  If you’re gonna talk about Flint, if you’re gonna talk about, it seems to me, Ferguson, you have to talk about Palestine.  If you’re going to talk about repression in the United States, you’ve got to figure out how these modes of repression have become global because something has happened that we—that suggests a new kind of politics: Politics is local, and power is global.  The elite float; they don’t care about the social contract anymore.  So, you know, we see a level of disposability, a level of violence, that is really unlike anything we’ve seen before.  (c. 54:02)

“I mean, Donald Trump talking about the Central Park Five still being guilty, give me a break.  I mean, what is this really about? Is it about somebody who’s just ignorant and stupid?  Or is it somebody who now is part of a ruling class, that is so indifferent to questions of justice that they actually boast about their own racism?”  (c. 54:20)

AMY GOODMAN:  “Hm.  So. let me ask you about the issue of education.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Right.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “The debate here is around school choice—”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Right, right.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “—of vouchers, charter schools.  But you’ve been talking about schools for a long time.  What is the role of schools and education in our society?”  [overlapping voices; Dr. Giroux eagerly begins answering the question before Amy Goodman finished answering it.]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Schools should be democratic public spheres.  They should be places, that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools, that they need to be able to, both, relate to themselves and others in the wider world in a way in which they can imagine that world as a better place.  (c. 54:51)

“I mean it seems to me, at the heart of any education, that matters, is a central question:  How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future, that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political, and social justice?”  (c. 55:03)

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “And so, how do you see, then—for instance, the Obama administration has been a big promoter of charter schools and these privatisation efforts as a school choice model.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “I—the Obama administration is a disgrace on education.  The Obama administration, basically, is an administration, that has bought the neoliberal line.  It drinks the orange juice.  I mean it doesn’t see schools as a public good.  It doesn’t see schools as places where, basically, we can educate students in a way to take democracy seriously and to be able to fight for it.  It sees them as, basically, kids, who should be part of the global workforce.  But it does more because not understanding schools as democratic public spheres means that the only place you can really go is, either, to acknowledge and not do anything about the fact that many of them are now modeled after prisons, or, secondly, they become places, that kill their radical imagination.

“Teaching for the test is a way to kill the radical imagination.  It’s a way to make kids boring; you know?  It’s a way to make them ignorant.  It’s a way to shut them off from the world in a way in which they can recognise that their agency matters.  It matters.  You can’t be in an environment and take education seriously when your education is under—when your agency is under assault.” (c. 56:15)

AMY GOODMAN:  “—[Dr. Giroux interjected before Goodman could respond.]”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “You can’t do it.”  (c. 56:17)

AMY GOODMAN:  “You begin your book with a quote of Albert Camus: ‘Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.'” [overlapping voices; Dr. Giroux begins agreeing prior to Goodman completing her statement]

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.  Yeah, yeah.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Explain.” (c. 56:25)

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I’ll explain it in terms of a slogan, a Donald Trump slogan: Let’s make America great again.  You know—and when I hear that—that seems to suggest there was a moment in the past when America really was great—you know?—when women knew their places, when we could set dogs on black people in Mississippi, when young people went and sat-in in at lunch counters and were assaulted by others, that’s about—that’s about the death of memory.  That’s about memory being, basically, suppressed in a way, that doesn’t allow people to understand that there are things, that happened in the past, that we not only have to remember, we have to prevent from happening again.  Or, at another level, it suggests the suppression of memory, so that those things can happen again and that we don’t have to worry about them.

“And, so, it seems to me that a country without a sense of public memory, without a sense of historical memory, is a country always in crisis.” (c. 57:13)

AMY GOODMAN:  “You have talked about Donald Trump also coming about, the phenomenon, as the—a failure of the progressive left.”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Yeah.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “How?”

DR. HENRY GIROUX:  “Well, I think that, you know, one of the things about the left—three things about the left disturb me, Amy.  One is, they never really have taken education seriously.  They think education is about schooling.  What they don’t realise is that forms of domination are not just simply structural.  They’re also about changing consciousness.  They’re also about getting people to invest in a language in which they can recognise that the problems, that we’re talking about have something to do with their lives.  It means making something meaningful, to make it critical, to make it transformative.  (c. 57:55)

“Secondly, it seems to me that the left is too involved in isolated issues [i.e., identity politics]. [11]  You know, we’ve got to bring these issues together to create a mass social movement, that in some way really challenges the kind of power that we’re now confronting.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Only the beginning of the conversation.  Henry Giroux, thanks so much for being with us, McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest.  His new book: America at War with Itself.

“That does it for our broadcast.  Oh, Juan, tomorrow is a very special day: Happy birthday!”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “Amy, thank you.”

AMY GOODMAN:  “Well, we’ll be broadcas—”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:  “You didn’t need to mention that. [chuckles] (c. 58:28)”

AMY GOODMAN:  “We’ll be broadcasting Monday from North Dakota, from right near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.  Tune in.  [SNIP]  ”

[end of Democracy Now! broadcast]

KPFA CART:  Dr. Ralph Nader presentation:  Breaking Through Power, Monday, October 17, 2016, , First Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, California; Mickey Huff will host.

[SNIP]  (c. 59:59)

Learn more at DEMOCRACY NOW!.

***

[1]  Unfortunately, the brief interview seems to have been designed as a form of news abuse in the sense that the entire brief interview, as evidenced by the line of questions the interviewers asked, was not interested in the larger issues discussed in the book about the anti-democratic trends plaguing our institutions, such as education and our political system, a cartelised two-party dictatorship, as Ralph Nader calls it.  Dr. Giroux doesn’t seem to ever use that term.  But if you read more than a soundbite from Dr. Giroux, you will find that he’s very clear on the political corruption of both political parties.

But this interview is taking place in the context of the ongoing 2016 U.S. presidential election and free speech radio (and TV) coverage, with the election less than a month away.  And this interview, as evidenced by the questions from Amy Goodman and Juan González, the editorial slant at Democracy Now! was bent on using Dr. Henry Giroux to sensationalise a bogeyman image of Donald Trump and foment fear among the listeners and viewers.  That is news abuse, in terms of critical media literacy.  And Democracy Now!, like the editorial slant of the SaveKPFA faction at KPFA, has framed the overwhelming majority of its interviews and discussions, which have touched upon the 2016 presidential election, within a narrow-two party framework, and which (intentionally or not) functions to help marginalise alternative political parties and their candidates.  And alternative candidates, such as the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka, are far closer aligned to the ideals and general philosophy of socioeconomic justice championed by Democracy Now! (and KPFA radio).  Yet, they’re loathe to admit it.

Democracy Now! was not interested in the more profound issues being raised by Dr. Giroux, only in a narrow fear-mongering trope about Donald Trump, with a conspicuous implicit subtext to vote for Hillary Clinton.  No critical questions were asked about Hillary Clinton or her how her political record compares to her campaign platform, even though Amy Goodman herself actually emphasised the importance of this point in a speech she gave earlier this year.  But, in practice, Democracy Now! seems to primarily acquiesce to the anti-democratic nature of the two-party machine, which not only keeps out other political parties.  The Democratic Party even keeps out left-of-center candidates, such as Bernie Sanders.  And this is not the first time, as Dr. Jill Stein, has pointed out elsewhere:

“And what we learned, in the course of Bernie’s campaign, is that you cannot have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party.

“The party pulled out its kill switch against Bernie and sabotaged him.  As we saw from the emails revealed, showing the collusion between the Democratic National Committee, Hillary’s campaign, and members of the corporate media.

“And it wasn’t the first time.  This happened to Dennis Kucinich.  It happened to Jesse Jackson.  They did it even to Howard Dean, creating the ‘Dean Scream’.

“This is how they work.  And it’s been a huge wake-up moment.”

This is not the first time this type of news abuse has been perpetrated by Democracy Now!  Some of us have been watching their election coverage since the show began in 1996.  And it seems clear that the editorial agenda at Democracy Now!, during election cycles, has been to subtly steer voters toward the Democratic Party.  A rigorous analysis of Democracy Now!‘s coverage of presidential elections will likely demonstrate this.  And, inhabiting such a central role within free speech media, Democracy Now! should be held accountable for this.  But few have wanted to be critical of their beloved Democracy Now!  Mnar Muhawesh (Mint Press News) is one of the few voices we’ve heard on free speech radio be critical about the failings of our beloved Democracy Now! and their figureheads, such as Amy Goodman.

“But you and I, we’ve been through that; and this is not our fate
So, let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

[2]  Terrestrial radio transmission, 94.1 FM (KPFA, Berkeley, CA; Pacifica Radio Network, nationwide) with online simulcast and digital archiving:  Democracy Now!, one-hour episode co-hosted by Juan González and Amy Goodman, Friday, 14 OCT 2016, 09:00 PDT.

[3]  The Central Park Five is a tragic story of five black and Latino teenagers wrongly accused and imprisoned between 7 and 13 years in jail each for the assault, the rape and beating of a white woman, which they did not commit.  Donald Trump put out ads back in 1989, which helped railroad the five teenagers, whose sentences were later vacated when the actual perpetrator came forward and a DNA match was established.

Yes, Donald Trump is a political opportunist.  But, unfortunately, that is not newsworthy, unless one is engaging in electoral propaganda.  Of course, it doesn’t have to be newsworthy.  We can have political commentary and opinion, as long as we’re clear on what’s being presented.  In this case, this ‘Central Park Five’ news story is not actually news, technically speaking.  The only thing new is the fact that one of the Central Park Five, Yusef Salaam, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post, in which he outlined the legal and social injustices suffered by the Central Park Five as well as the sinister role Donald Trump played in the matter.

The constant reporting on trivial details about Trump, such as his latest inappropriate remark, is definitely emblematic of junk food news.  The rehashing of the Central Park Five story, of course, is not junk food news.  But, as we learn from our critical media literacy education, the placement of this story by Democracy Now! within this broadcast to reinforce the paradigm of fear of Trump and a reactionary vote for neoliberal Hillary Clinton is an example of news abuse.  An older example, as Dr. Peter Phillips has mentioned, would be the case of the Jon Benet story, which was also tragic, but overly reported so as to drown out other more consequential news stories.

The central thrust of Yusef Salaam’s opinion piece in The Washington Post is summarised in its subtitle:  The Republican candidate’s antics have filled me with fear.

The implied fear-based messaging is clear, however: Vote Hillary for president next month.

Similarly, the function of Democracy Now! broadcasting a segment about an opinion-piece expressing fear of a Trump presidency also serves to send subtle messaging to its audiences to vote Hillary for president.  And many liberals are already of a lesser-of-two-evils mentality, and don’t need any further enabling from Democracy Now!, who should be counted on to maintain its commitment to critical analysis, even during election cycles.  But, it’s clear the editorial slant at Democracy Now! favours Hillary Clinton.  Even though, Democracy Now! has taken credit for ‘Expanding the Debates’ during recent broadcasts by inserting responses from willing candidates excluded from the Debates.  (Only the Green Party candidates, Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka agreed to participate in Democracy Now!‘s expanded debates.  It’s unclear whether or not Democracy Now! also invited smaller political parties, such as the socialist Peace and Freedom Party based in California.)

But, despite token coverage of the Green Party candidates, the overwhelming bulk of Democracy Now!‘s coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election has been focused on the Democratic and Republican Party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  And, worse, it’s largely been uncritical, or toned down its critique, of Hillary Clinton, who, essentially, stole the Democratic Primary.

[4]  A leading question is one which leads the person being questioned to respond in a certain way.  This can be objectionable of proper, depending on the circumstances.  In this case, Amy Goodman‘s selection of a quote from Dr. Giroux‘s book foreword, invoking the spectre of a Donald Trump presidency, seems designed to lead Dr. Giroux into contributing to Democracy Now!‘s ongoing agenda of fomenting fear of a Donald Trump presidency, of prioritising a dominant focus on a binary, good versus evil, narrative of Donald Trump posing an unprecedented menace to society with Hillary Clinton cast as the voice of reason.  But Dr. Giroux is concerned with larger, more profound issues, which transcend one single candidate.  Thus, Dr. Giroux seemed to disappoint Goodman’s interview agenda.  (Apparently undeterred, Juan González kept the Democracy Now! agenda on track when it was his turn to ask question of Dr. Giroux, steering the interview topic back to the Donald Trump talking point with an even more pointed focus than before.)

The dominant focus of this broadcast was:  Fear Trump.  Two of the three news stories were framed in terms of a fear of a Donald Trump presidency.  The framing of the Democracy Now! segment on Dr. Henry Giroux‘s new book is unmistakable in the segment title:  Is Trump’s Rise a Result of America Declaring War on Institutions That Make Democracy Possible?  The segment about the Central Park Five is about an anti-Trump opinion piece recently published in The Washington Post.  We may wonder, however, why an opinion piece about a fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency was not featured, instead, or even an entire factual book, such as My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency (2015) by Doug Henwood or Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich (2015) by Peter Schweizer.  For example, Honduras has now become one of the most dangerous nations for activists, or citizens attempting to experience democracy in their daily lives.  Thanks to the role Hillary Clinton played, as U.S. Secretary of State, in helping to legitimate the military coup against the Democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, prize-winning activists, such as Berta Caseres have been assassinated for standing up to exploitative behaviours of multinational corporations after being targeted, threatened, and harassed.  Only through hyperbole and bad journalism can opportunist Donald Trump be elevated to a bogeyman and neoliberal Hillary Clinton be humanised, as a lesser of two evils.  They are, both, just evil.  Can we say that one pedophile is more evil than another?  Not really.  They are both sick.  They both need help.  They must both be kept away from positions of authority where the health and safety of society is at stake.

[5]  Another example of America being at war with itself, of a war on an institution, which makes democracy possible, is the war on the democratic process itself.  The two-party cartelisation of the political process works to censor all political diversity, keep out alternative political parties, kill the American political imagination, and keep the American people within the tight grip of a neoliberal agenda, whether it’s at the hands of a Democratic or Republican administration.  And, sadly, when we look closely, through a critical media literacy lens, we find that Democracy Now! also works to censor all political diversity when it counts the most, during presidential elections when most Americans are likely to be paying attention to political discussions.  Keeping a focus on the two corporate political parties and their candidates helps steer progressives toward the neoliberal Democratic Party, or toward a sense of disaffection in the face of a defeatist TINA ideology—there is no alternative.

[6]  Dr. Giroux raised the question:  How do you understand these isolated incidents [of erosion of democracy] within a larger set of categories, that tell us exactly what’s happening?  One way we can understand these social ills is through understanding the form of socioeconomic organisation, or mode of production, by which we organise our American society.  Given the American capitalist modes of production, our society’s social priorities are subordinated to the goals of the capitalist owning classes to capture profits and market share by any means necessary and regardless of the human or environmental cost.  This means privatising education, criminalising redundant populations, profiting from prisons, profiting from health care, and so on.  And, above all, in terms of pedagogy in education, it means killing the radical spirit and even political imagination of our students, so that they become uncritical cogs in the national machine of capitalist production.  It means killing off the capacity in our students to ever imagine a better world.  In California, Common Core educational standards emphasise evidence-based reasoning.  But, if the educational content being presented to students is narrowed and sterilised, and students are never asked to question the authority or validity of the truth-claims being taught, then there is a gaping hole in our students’ capacity for meaningful critical thinking and knowledge-building.  Books have been written to counter many of the problems with the educational content being presented to our students.  Dr. James W. Loewen‘s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is one example.  Dr. Howard Zinn‘s A People’s History of the United States is another.  And, of course, the epic documentary film series, The Untold History of the United States, by Oliver Stone and Dr. Peter Kuznets is another excellent example of a valuable resource to supplement educational content.  Yet, sadly, most Americans have acquiesced to these totalitarian trends.

For an excellent academic paper addressing some of these themes, read:  Benson, P., & Kirsch, S.. (2010). Capitalism and the Politics of Resignation. Current Anthropology, 51(4), 459–486. http://doi.org/10.1086/653091  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/653091

[7]  As noted above, the focus is kept on fomenting a fear of a Donald Trump presidency, apparently intended to trigger fear-based decision-making responses in the audience to steer voters toward voting for Hillary Clinton.  Of all the chapters, Juan González chose to focus on the one chapter on Trump.  In the absence, of any meaningful inclusion of Dr. Jill Stein in the overarching, ongoing, political analyses and discussions within Democracy Now!‘s 2016 presidential election coverage, it becomes clear that the suggestion is toward Hillary Clinton as the antithesis to a Donald Trump presidency, not toward other alternatives to the two-party status quo, such as the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein, whose campaign platform, ironically, is more closely aligned to the ideals of Democracy Now! than is Hillary Clinton’s campaign platform.

[8]  Here we see Dr. Henry Giroux undermining the Trump-as-bogeyman fearmongering agenda of Democracy Now!  Yes, Trump is bad for America.  But so is the neoliberal agenda of Hillary Clinton.  Trump is not “some essence of evil” or bogeyman, as Dr. Giroux subtly informs his Democracy Now! hosts.  It is this larger, neoliberal capitalist imperative, which must be confronted, and which is perpetuated by the two-party system, the two-party dictatorship.  And it is that imperative, that system, which is being perpetuated by an uncritical acquiescence to a cartelised two-party system, which, by definition, kills political diversity and kills our political imagination.

Unfortunately, this subtle admonishment is not enough to make explicit the terrible mistakes of journalism, which Democracy Now! is making by predominantly framing their 2016 U.S. presidential election coverage within a narrow two-party framework, even despite token broadcasts featuring the Green Party’s Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka.

[9]  Dr. Noam Chomsky and others have also written compellingly about the historical trend towards fascism, totalitarianism, or authoritarianism in the United States since, at least, the 1960s government backlash against civic engagement, or political engagement, or as Project Censored’s Andy Lee Roth has recently noted, experiencing democracy on a daily basis, rather than as a shallow participation every few years, in which one passively (and often thoughtlessly) chooses an electoral choice from a predetermined menu, which one had no participatory role in creating.

[10]  Indeed, various experts have written, and commented, about the incompatibility between democracy and capitalism (i.e., capitalist modes of production).

(I’ll have to find a few of those references and include them in this footnote.  A great place to start is with understanding capital and capitalism.  Ilan Ziv‘s Capitalism: A Six-Part Series is a highly accessible and intellectually sound entry point for anyone interested in understanding the capitalist modes of production, which circumscribe all of our lives.)

Essentially, democracy calls for meaningful participation from the citizenry in expressing its political, its socioeconomic, will, which elected leaders and state officials are charged with operationalising.  Capitalism, or capitalist modes of production, on the other hand, prioritise property rights and profit motive above all other considerations, such as democracy in the workplace.  Capitalism requires authoritarianism or fascism in the workplace.  Capitalist labour relations, by definition, involve uneven power relations in which a capitalist employer has all of the power in negotiating wages and working conditions; and employees of capitalists have no choice but to take it or leave it.  This causes income inequality from the start of capitalistic enterprise between the working classes and the capitalist owning classes, the owners of capital, of businesses and corporations.  At the core of capitalist relations we find these uneven power relations and conditions of exploitation.

And, since we allow money to influence our political process, obviously, the owning classes have an advantage in unduly influencing political messaging and propaganda in the nation.  This power differential between the working classes and the capitalist owning classes is why, for example, the nation’s tax burden has been perpetually shifted from corporations (once known as royal charters) onto the working classes, such that income tax, as we now know it, didn’t start in earnest until 1913 with the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  Prior to that, since the nation’s inception, it was understood that the largest corporations could, and should, solely bear the nation’s tax burden.

And, of course, since we went off the gold standard in 1971 under Richard Nixon, taxes function much differently now.  This point brings us, eventually, to modern monetary theory (or modern money theory).  In 1971, the Nixon administration was mired in the American military efforts to control Vietnamese political self-determination (i.e., the so-called Vietnam War).  At that point, the U.S., essentially, ran out of gold and closed the gold window.  So, Nixon ended the international convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold.  Thus, nowadays, as Dr. Stephanie Kelton and other heterodox economists explain:  Taxes, technically, don’t pay for anything because all modern money exists as an IOU.  These government IOUs are lent, or spent, into creation by the state.  And when they return to the state in the form of tax payments, those IOUs are extinguished, are erased.  Dr. Kelton would emphasise this point by reminding us that the federal reserve actually shred that money, which can be observed whenever one takes a tour of a federal reserve bank.

Obviously, the people, the working classes, would rather not be taxed on their income, as it limits their purchasing power, their livelihoods.  But, because of the incompatibility between capitalism and democracy, the people’s popular will is subordinated to that of the capitalist owning and ruling classes.  But the tax code is only one example of the social ills caused and exacerbated by capitalist modes of production.  Other problems arise in self-serving industry deregulation of safety and environmental protections through political interventions by capitalist elites.  A recent example is the Dakota Access pipeline being built through the sovereign indigenous lands.  Native American leaders have led the resistance to this capitalist project and have been met with violence, repression, and even attack dogs.  Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman, as noted above, is even facing criminal trespass charges for filming the state violence against First Amendment activities.

But, virtually everywhere we turn in society, we can see capitalist profit motive at odds with humanity.  This is why capitalist modes of production are incompatible with democracy, because the will of unqualified profit motive is at odds with the needs of a nation, or socioeconomic polity.

[11]  This is the form of false consciousness in which the left isolates itself into narrow silos, which are narrowly focused on single-issue politics, often identity politics.

***

[14 OCT 2016]

[Last modified 17:26 PDT  17 OCT 2016]

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The Atlantic: Should Students Learn About Black Lives Matter In School?

23 Sat Jul 2016

Posted by ztnh in Anti-Fascism, Critical Pedagogy, Education, Philosophy of Education, Police State, Racism (phenotype)

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Alia Wong, FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Hayley Glatter, New School for Social Research, Project Censored, Radical Pedagogy, The Atlantic, University of Missouri-Kansas City

the_atlantic_magazine_coverLUMPENPROLETARIAT—If we consider the press critically, of course, we find for-profit broadcast media to be compromised in its journalistic integrity and riddled with censorship and/or underreporting and obfuscation of important news stories. [1]  But, even non-profit, audience-sponsored, broadcast media often suffers from self-censorship of varying degrees. [2]

Similarly, as free speech radio is, first and foremost, an educational institution, our public school classrooms suffer from censorship and self-censorship, which stifles critical thinking.  School textbooks may discuss Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War), as issues of the past, as if the same struggles for civil and human rights and opposition to wars of capitalist imperialism are no longer happening.  Dr. James Loewen, as well as Dr. bell hooks and others engaged with critical pedagogy, have also drawn attention to the distortions and misrepresentations of history, and even outright lies found in most American history textbooks.  This uncritical acceptance of substandard textbooks and uncritical pedagogy, of course, does not only affect history and social studies, which usually glosses over the American government’s repression, enslavement, and genocide of ethnic minorities and also fails to address current events of great import and historical significance, such as Black Lives Matter and extrajudicial or illegal killings of unarmed children and adults by police, death in custody cases, police brutality, and disparities in the criminal justice system.

Similar problems are found in the discipline of economics, which is divided between a heterodox approach and a neoclassical approach to economics.  A neoclassical approach is predicated upon unrealistic assumptions about human nature and society, assumptions which are overly mathematised and completely delinked from any meaningful historical context.  Heterodox economics offers more pluralistic and, thus, more coherent analyses.  But this approach is confined to only a minority of heterodox economics departments, such as that of the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the New School for Social Research in New York City. [3]

Our education system continues to be adversely impacted by the historical legacies of American racism, white supremacy, nationalism, and anti-communist, anti-socialist, pro-capitalist ideologies, which stifle truly critical analyses in American schools.

As educator Dr. Henry Giroux argues, we are rendering our students diminished in their capacities for critical thinking because we restrict the critical thinking, which we allow our students to engage in, to only involve prescribed content from textbooks, which usually avoid controversy, contemporary issues, and subtly stay within a particular establishment ideology of uncritical acceptance of capitalist modes of production, free market fundamentalism, American exceptionalism, and suppression of the American government’s enslavement, oppression, genocide, and dispossession of ethnic minorities.

Students, and educators, are not fully liberated to explore and critically engage with the world around them.  Consequently, most educators and the teaching programmes from which they hail, are largely uncritical conveyor belts of the status quo, enabling the persistence of historical social ills and pathologies.  But, some courageous educators are challenging pedagogies of repression and engaging in critical pedagogy.  And, in so doing, they are resisting the deprofessionalisation of educators.

A recent article in the The Atlantic asked the question:  Should students learn about Black Lives Matter in school?

It’s a good question.  The answer should be obvious.  But for some, probably, Orwellian reason, it is not.  And that should give us great concern for its implications for a democratic society, when successive generations of students are kept in the dark about the problems of society and effectively inoculated against any concept of civic engagement.

Messina

***

THE ATLANTIC—[21 JUL 2016]  Should Students Learn About Black Lives Matter In School?  The lengthy timelines of publishing new history textbooks—and the problematic narratives those books often present—push primary resources to the forefront of current-events education.

Hayley Glatter

If the Chicago social-studies teacher Gregory Michie waits for a textbook to teach his students about the Black Lives Matter movement, the first seventh-graders to hear the lesson won’t be born for another seven years.

Despite the historical implications of that movement, bureaucratic timelines all but quash any possibility that students might learn about today’s events from an actual history textbook in the near future.  According to Anthony Pellegrino, an assistant professor of education at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, many school districts receive new books on a seven-year cycle. However, in some states, schools don’t receive new books for 10 to 12 years, and the most current material in those books could be a few years old.  Certainly digital textbooks shorten this timeframe, but physical copies lag far behind: In some districts like Michie’s, students are reading textbooks that don’t even contain the name Barack Obama.

On top of that, the chapters on America’s most recent history often fall short.  Because content on, say, the American Revolution, has been read and edited over the course of multiple book editions, more recent chapters often “feel like just add-ons.” Pellegrino said.  “They’re so afraid to tackle anything current because we don’t have the perspective of history to be able to inform us more.  As such, the sentences, the words, the paragraphs, are just really vapid.”

But Michie, who teaches seventh- and eighth-graders at The Windy City’s William H. Seward Communication Arts Academy, doesn’t let outdated textbooks deter him from addressing timely, sensitive topics in the classroom.  Michie said the social-studies textbooks at Seward are around 20 years old, but even if they were contemporary, he wouldn’t rely on them. The history books “are just horrible,” he said.  “They dodge controversy.  Textbooks are commercials for the countries they’re made in.”  Instead, Michie’s conversations with students are rooted in sources ranging from images to political cartoons as he moves social-justice issues to the forefront with lessons that draw on modern cases like those of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown.

The use of primary-source documents has become a popular tool for teachers seeking to bring current events into the classroom, particularly as schools have adopted the Common Core standards, which encourage students to engage with such resources.  But the immediacy and timeliness of police brutality, activism, and institutionalized racism have led educators to consider the ramifications of sharing these issues with students.  Michie said talking about newsworthy events is critical, but his teaching of sensitive contemporary issues has drawn criticism—someone on Twitter called the lessons indoctrination.  However, he thinks the world outside the classroom is too relevant to ignore inside school walls.  Not discussing current events and issues of race, Michie said, sends a stark message to kids because “our silence as teachers speaks very loudly to our students.”

Public-school teachers should stand up against racism, should stand up against homophobia, should stand up against religious intolerance.

In addition to the relevance of topics like Black Lives Matter, Daisy Martin, a senior research associate in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, said weaving current events into lesson plans provides an opportunity for history teachers to re-engage their students.  “One of the most common words that’s used to describe history in K-12 is ‘boring,’ and kids think of it as, ‘It’s all done, and it’s sort of determined,’” Martin said.  By talking about what is going on now and explaining the connections between past and present, teachers can work to remove that stigma.

However, as Michie demonstrated, teachers who choose to bring current events into the classroom face numerous challenges.  And it’s not just claims of imprinting a teacher’s opinions on the class—Martin said some history teachers struggle to discuss sensitive topics because they may feel like they don’t know enough about the topic, have too much to cover already, or lack the school-wide support needed for such conversations.  Michie, though, is adamant about not shying away from sensitive topics: “Public-school teachers should stand up against racism, should stand up against homophobia, should stand up against religious intolerance.  To me, that’s not [taking] a side.  We have to advocate for, and believe in, and have high hopes for all of our students.”

Not everyone agrees with Michie, and textbook publishers are saddled with the task of appealing to a wide audience around the country.  And yet, certainly today’s political, social, and economic climates will be written about in history books. The events of today have been compared to the tumult of 1968, a year frequently cited as one of the most dynamic in American history—that year, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, riots burst out during the Chicago-hosted Democratic National Convention, and the Tet Offensive was launched in Vietnam.

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

THE ATLANTIC—[21 OCT 2015]  History Class and the Fictions About Race In America  High-school textbooks too often gloss over the American government’s oppression of racial minorities.

Alia Wong

Earlier this month, McGraw Hill found itself at the center of some rather embarrassing press after a photo showing a page from one of its high-school world-geography textbooks was disseminated on social media. The page features a seemingly innocuous polychromatic map of the United States, broken up into thousands of counties, as part of a lesson on the country’s immigration patterns: Different colors correspond with various ancestral groups, and the color assigned to each county indicates its largest ethnic representation. The page is scarce on words aside from an introductory summary and three text bubbles explaining specific trends—for example, that Mexico accounts for the largest share of U.S. immigrants today.

The recent blunder has to do with one bubble in particular. Pointing to a patch of purple grids extending throughout the country’s Southeast corridor, the one-sentence caption reads:

The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.

The photo that spread through social media was taken by a black Texas student named Coby Burren, who subsequently texted it to his mom, Roni-Dean Burren. “Was real hard workers, wasn’t we,” he wrote. Roni-Dean quickly took to Facebook, lambasting the blunder: the reference to the Africans as workers rather than slaves. A video she later posted has been viewed nearly 2 million times, and her indignation has renewed conversations around the Black Lives Matter movement while attracting coverage by almost every major news outlet. “It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” she told The New York Times. “It’s that nuance of language. This is what erasure looks like.”

McGraw Hill swiftly did its damage control. It announced that it was changing the caption in both the digital and print versions to characterize the migration accurately as a “forced” diaspora of slaves: “We conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves,” the company said in a statement. “We believe we can do better.” Catherine Mathis, the company’s spokeswoman, also emphasized that the textbook accurately referred to the slave trade and its brutality in more than a dozen other instances. And McGraw Hill has offered to provide various additional resources to any school that requests them, including supplemental materials on cultural competency, replacement textbooks, or stickers with a corrected caption to place over the erroneous one. But Texas school districts were already in possession of more than 100,000 copies of the book, while another 40,000, according to Mathis, are in schools in other states across the country.

If nothing else, the incident may serve as yet another example of why social studies—and history in particular—is such a tricky subject to teach, at least via textbooks and multiple-choice tests. Its topics are inherently subjective, impossible to distill into paragraphs jammed with facts and figures alone. As the historian and sociologist Jim Loewen recently told me, in history class students typically “have to memorize what we might call ‘twigs.’ We’re not teaching the forest—we’re not even teaching the trees,” said Loewen, best known for his 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. “We are teaching twig history.”

Learn more at THE ATLANTIC.

***

[1]  For example, see Project Censored, which publishes an annual book of the most censored news stories, as peer-reviewed evidence of persistent media censorship.  Project Censored also broadcasts a weekly radio show out of free speech radio KPFA and across its national Pacifica Radio Network.  And, in 2013, Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar directed Project Censored: The Movie, Ending the Reign of Junk Food News.

Also see articles featuring Project Censored at Lumpenproletariat.

CounterSpin is another good media analysis production by the media watchdog group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), which airs on free speech radio stations throughout the nation.

[2]  One valid complaint, which could often be levelled against, for example, free speech radio KPFA is its tendency to shy away from the more controversial topics and issues.  For example, KPFA has been willing to air documentaries about the Black Panther Party history from the 1960s and ’70s, but has deemed it necessary to censor its descendants, which are currently civically engaged, such as J.R. Valrey and his Block Report Radio broadcasts, which used to air during The Morning Mix morning show.  Many people are okay discussing issues of racism, class struggle, and capitalist imperialism, but only if the issues are safely removed decades in the past.  The same goes for the 9/11 Truth Movement, which is not fully supported by all at free speech radio KPFA.  This editorial bifurcation reflects the historic internal struggle of free speech radio KPFA’s competing faction’s ideologies.

The radio programming produced by the less progressive faction at KPFA, which shamelessly calls itself SaveKPFA (appropriating the slogan from 1999 when KPFA listeners and staff successfully resisted attempts to hijack the station), has improved in terms of its willingness to confront police state terrorism, extrajudicial killings by police, death in custody cases, and police brutality and corruption scandals.  But it was not always like this. [2]  The more progressive, or revolutionary, broadcasters, such as JR Valrey with Block Report Radio and Dennis Bernstein‘s Flashpoints, and Davey D‘s Hard Knock Radio, which first featured Block Report Radio, paved the way for radical social justice campaigns, such as Black Lives Matter.

[3]  The history of free speech radio is obscure, but it’s out there.  As a truly concerned listener, among many scores, your author has had many memorable (and insightful) experiences in, and around, KPFA and the Pacifica Radio Network.  Your author’s experience with the behind-the-scenes KPFA dirt began before, and extended after, running for the KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) in 2010, as part of the Voices for Justice LSB slate, including SF Bay Area labour journalist Steve Zeltzer and Kurdish-American Dr. Sureya Sayadi.

One fine afternoon, back when my family and I lived on Liselle Lane in Modesto, California, circa 2012, I had the good fortune of chatting on the phone with Curt Gray, of the original Save KPFA.  He was a kind soul, who empathised with my being mistreated, like others, at KPFA by the elite clique, which had appropriated the Save KPFA name.  (Even SaveKPFA poster-boy Brian Edwards-Tiekert was surprised when I asked him for us to take a picture together during a ballot-count in Berkeley during a 2010 ballot count.  I wanted to believe we were misunderstanding Brian, so I also maintained polite interpersonal relations, although I disagreed with him publicly whilst campaigning for the LSB.)  Curt Gray confirmed my observations, which corroborated his narratives of KPFA/Pacifica history and perceptions about the SaveKPFA faction (formerly known as Concerned Listeners).  Gray described how this faction at KPFA used a system of patronage to bring in lackeys to do their dirty work.

Read Curt Gray’s article, “Stealing Save KPFA“, from 2010:

Stealing Save KPFA, 20 SEP 2010

by Curt Gray in concurrence with Jeffrey Blankfort, Maria Gilardin, Marianne Torres and Sasha Futran

I have learned that a group that had formerly called itself the Concerned Listeners, a faction in the community who are partisan supporters of the status quo controlling clique that runs KPFA and opposes accountability and participation by “outsiders” in the station, is now calling itself Save KPFA. The choice of this name is an ahistoric action that speaks of an arrogant sense of entitlement and a lack of knowledge or interest in how KPFA has developed and changed throughout its history as a ground-breaking community radio station.

The sad irony is that the original Save KPFA advanced ideals and goals that were and are in moral opposition to what this current group seems to be supporting. The original Save KPFA championed democracy, transparency, community participation and accountability for KPFA as a vital and irreplaceable resource of the Northern California progressive community.

The real, original Save KPFA came out of large public meetings held at the Ashkenaz Folk Dance and Music Hall on Berkeley’s San Pablo Avenue. The meetings were called by a group of listeners and unpaid KPFA programmers in response to station management’s unilateral actions to cancel a swath of community volunteer produced programming without notice or discussion. In the winter of early 1993 there were meetings attended by more than 200 people, both listeners and programmers, and all expressed growing concerns about the direction that KPFA was headed and a fear that the community that both supported and depended on KPFA was being pushed aside.

Those early meetings of hundreds of listeners and activists and a scattering of staff led to more than a year of intense organizing and a harsh education on the widening distance between what supporters of KPFA believed Pacifica was and the reality behind the image. It was the first time that many had a chance to tell and share with the larger community their knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, information that was kept off the air and out of the printed program guide, the Folio. Coming together in these early meetings, gaining knowledge by sharing information, developing a more sophisticated understanding of who and what was shaping changes in the radio station that they had supported and relied on for so long, this was one of the beginnings of a nationwide Free Pacifica movement.

At these town hall style meetings on those rainy winter nights in the darkened nightclub we learned for the first time about Pacifica’s Strategy for National Programming document that over time called for more and more local volunteer produced programming to be replaced by national programming produced by radio professionals. It also called for Pacifica to go after big money grants to fund all this programming, with a stated aim to become “partners and players” with the largest corporate foundations such as the Pew, Ford, Carnegie and Readers Digest Foundations.

There were plans for national morning shows and national overnight call-in talk shows with big name celebrity hosts. We recognized this abandonment of local and volunteer produced programming as a fundamental turning away from what makes community radio what it is supposed to be. We called it what it was, NPR-ization of community radio. These plans were moving forward with little or no knowledge or input from listeners or the average programmer.

For the first time in a long time, a group of listeners were learning how KPFA really worked. We learned that there was a Program Council that consisted of programming department heads that met every week at the station. We learned that there was a local station advisory board that met quietly at the station every month, which should have been a venue for community input, if listeners had been encouraged to attend or even knew it existed.

The local board was self-selected and had the power to seat their members on the Pacifica National Board, the real holder of KPFA’s license, that met only three or four times a year in different parts of the country. Pacifica was and is a network with four other stations that also shares programming with many other affiliate community stations. A lot of the real power to decide the direction of the network seemed to be in the hands of the Pacifica Foundation’s Executive Committee and smaller power cliques within each station. There was no mechanism for any accountability to the people at the grassroots, the volunteer programmers and the subscribers and listeners.

At the core the station supporters in the public meetings at Ashkenaz loved KPFA and were fighting to defend it, especially its most progressive programming. But they started to realize that their interest and concerns were viewed somehow as a threat by an insular insider culture within the station’s management, staff, and local and national boards.

Out of the larger town hall style meetings KPFA’s new listener activists started to coalesce into the form of the organization named Save KPFA with a smaller, dedicated steering committee. Attempts were made to communicate, to share concerns, to work together with the other stakeholder groups – management, paid and unpaid staff, the station and foundation boards – to both protect and improve KPFA.

These attempts were met with a disturbing mix of fear, suspicion, contempt and disdain so frequently that the impression was communicated very clearly that only compliments were allowed and that any mere listener with a critical opinion was viewed as an enemy of the station as a whole. Not for the last time the listener activists had come together to defend programmers’ rights, but programmers did not return that solidarity by supporting the concerns of listeners.

A listener who politely tried to attend a Program Council meeting to suggest ways to use the station’s airwaves to educate listeners about internal station issues, as well as about larger media issues involving the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and was suggesting that perhaps the Program Council might benefit from having listener representatives attend, observe and contribute to station programming decisions was angrily shouted out of the meeting, because “listeners do not belong at Program Council meetings.”

When members of the new listener group Save KPFA started attending local and national board meetings, the members of these boards seemed disturbed to have actual listeners in the audience at their meetings. Any discussion of the issues raised at the listener meetings was mostly suppressed on station call-in shows and the letter section of the printed program guide, the Folio, making it difficult to include the larger listener community in the discussion.

A listener who politely tried to attend a Program Council meeting was angrily shouted out of the meeting, because “listeners do not belong at Program Council meetings.”

Through 1993 KPFA’s new listener activist movement moved from town hall meetings to taking action. The show of listener concerns at the first noisy public meetings at the Ashkenaz dance club resulted in the threatened programming changes being temporarily withdrawn, and KPFA’s verbally abusive and divisive station manager, Pat Scott, was kicked upstairs within Pacifica. She was replaced by her assistant, and within months the iron-fisted Scott would become Pacifica’s next executive director.

As the group recognized that the powers-that-be within Pacifica were not interested in allowing open discussion or debate of the listening community activists’ issues to reach the larger KPFA audience via any free exchange of views on the air or in the program guide, other ideas for getting the word out were tried.

Some Save KPFA activists tabled at progressive events, creating surveys to try to get feedback from KPFA listeners. Some started to set up pirate stations to create an alternative way to get information out. Listener activists tried to call in on KPFA shows and wrote letters to the local press about the issues within the station. And we started a mailing list to disseminate hidden information to interested listeners through newsletters. We invited representatives of KPFA management and the station board to attend and address our meetings.

There was little interest in the station to acknowledged Save KPFA or the community concerns it represented. In fact, a narrative quickly took hold that alternately trivialized the station’s critics as out of touch ’60s leftovers or demonized them as violent and out of control.

Save KPFA decided that if KPFA would not allow dialog on the air or in the pages of the Folio that the listener activists would buy an ad in the program guide to address the whole KPFA community, inside and outside the station. One of the activists was moved enough to donate the cost of the advertisement from his inheritance from his recently deceased mother. We filed a fictitious name application, opened a bank account and got a P.O. box. The Folio editor assured us that our ad would be accepted.

So Save KPFA met and worked on statements to outline our group’s concerns, positions, proposals. The group collaborated on statements that called for elected station boards and on-air discussion of internal station issues and for the station to depend on its listeners for its funding, not foundations. They were determined to keep KPFA a voice for dissent that was not afraid to be critical of the powerful and to keep the station close to the grassroots community of programmers and listeners who had supported it for decades.

Yet, when we submitted the advertisement and the money, suddenly the station refused the ad without explanation. Immediately Save KPFA created a flier featuring the text of our ad and asking why the station was censoring our Free Speech and distributed it that night at a large public event sponsored by the station. Station management then reversed themselves again, saying that they would not allow us to run the advert as we had designed it, but we could publish it as an “Open Letter” if we modified and edited it to fit into the space they allowed us in the Folio.

In our “Open Letter,” Save KPFA called for local station boards to be elected by subscribers and staff and for a regular, listener-run call-in show dedicated to discussing internal KPFA and Pacifica matters. This pressure from Save KPFA caused station management and the local advisory board to very tentatively allow an election among subscribers for a small minority of seats on the advisory board.

Save KPFA called for local station boards to be elected by subscribers and staff and for a regular, listener-run call-in show dedicated to discussing internal KPFA and Pacifica matters.

Even so, the people controlling KPFA and Pacifica acted out their internalized conflict between the hollow on-air rhetoric promoting democratic empowerment for everyone else in the world and the need to protect their effective total internal dominance of the station. First management announces the election in the program guide but no discussion or candidate forums on the air. Then they announce that the election is canceled for lack of candidates, even after a handful of listeners submit candidate statements.

Then they change their minds, but now the voting period was during the on-air fundraiser, and their policy was to not mention the election while pitching for donations on the air. In the last week to send in the ballots, an unenthusiastic recorded message is aired reminding listeners of the advisory board vote.

On one morning a paid staff member is reported to shout at a volunteer programmer in the control room, “Don’t play that when my audience can hear it. We don’t want any of those idiots elected to the board.”

The seeming attempt to stifle the election goes from bad to worse. The actual ballot is the thin newsprint of the back page of the program guide, which the listeners must cut out with scissors. Then they mark their votes, fold and tape the ballot together and send it through the mail. Many of the returned ballots were destroyed, torn to tatters by the post office sorting machinery, arriving in the station mailbox in little plastic body bags supplied by the Postal Service.

KPFA has so little respect for the election that ballots are collected in an open unsealed mail cubby where they spill out onto the floor like so much trash near the front door. When the time comes to count the votes, ballots are found scattered underfoot down the hall, blown by a draft from the street. None of the candidates or any representatives are allowed to watch the count.

It is announced that not enough votes were cast for the election to be valid. The votes are not counted, and where the ballots wind up is a mystery. Mention is made that some voters had written comments on their ballots, but the ballots disappear without being further examined.

In an announcement in the next Folio, the listeners are told that there were not enough votes but that the advisory board might seat some of the candidates on the board anyway. But that was not a true intention and none of the election candidates were every spoken to about sitting on the advisory board, even though they continued to attend the monthly meetings as members of the audience.

In the same period, the station staff had been demanding elections for the staff’s own representatives to have a couple of seats on the station advisory board. The station staff voted and elected Maria Gilardin, an unpaid staff member who was a leader of Save KPFA and one of the few staff critics of Pacifica’s leadership and policies, to be one of the first station staff representatives on the board. But before Maria could take the seat she had been elected to fill, she was banned from all Pacifica properties without any appeal on trumped up charges of inciting violence at a Pacifica National Board meeting in Los Angeles. The KPFA station staff seemed to meekly accept the effective gutting of their vote by the Pacifica board without protest.

These and other events are the legacy of Save KPFA in the year of 1993 at the beginning of the long struggle to democratically reform Pacifica and try to bring some accountability to KPFA and the network. It is the foundation of what became a movement and where many hard facts about the reality of Pacifica were learned.

SAVE KPFA IS PART OF PACIFICA’S HISTORY, AND THAT HISTORY STILL MATTERS NOW. It is a history that is preserved in Mathew Lasar’s book about the Pacifica struggle, “Uneasy Listening,” and on websites and email lists.

In 1995 Pacifica moved ahead with its plans to transform itself into a professional media organization by purging hundreds of volunteer programmers from the Pacifica stations, some of whom had donated their time and work to build the network for decades before being tossed aside as Pacifica tried to become more respectable. In response to the mass purge of programmers, the leadership of Save KPFA started a new organization, Take Back KPFA! TBK! carried on the struggle to reform Pacifica and KPFA for the next few years as similar organizations sprang into being at the other Pacifica stations and a truly national movement evolved.

Take Back KPFA! has its own history and accomplishments, and the struggle to reform KPFA and Pacifica continued to be difficult. Just as Save KPFA from 1993 led to Take Back KPFA! in 1995, when events started to build in 1999 towards Pacifica’s corporate takeover and the KPFA lock-out, members of Take Back KPFA! helped form a new organization with its goal right in its name, the Coalition for a democratic Pacifica. The CdP was and has been a front line organization in bringing about the elections for the KPFA Local Advisory Board and pushing through the new reform bylaws for Pacifica that gave subscribers and staff members of the Pacifica Foundation the power to elect station boards with oversight powers.

This history is too important to be allowed to be forgotten or erased. It is a story of a long exhausting struggle for needed progressive reform in the face of every kind of underhandedness, mean spiritedness, hypocrisy and deceit. The long fight for elections within Pacifica was finally won, but the same internal struggle for control of the stations and what sort of stations they will be continues.

The difference is that now those conflicts are out in the open light of day, because elections necessarily lead to more openness.

And most unfortunately, there are still those in and around KPFA who hate that openness and want to keep “the audience” at arm’s length.

Clearly, not only is this history at risk of being erased, but the democratic reforms themselves are under attack. The same culture within the station that feared listener activism and opposed any accountability or oversight has continued to try to undermine the new democratic structures. The status quo faction works to protect the station’s patronage culture by using their power within the station to recruit and elect slates of candidates who work to keep the democratic structures from functioning as they were meant to.

For the last few years, the anti-reform slate has called itself the KPFA Concerned Listeners. Now, in order to confuse and to hide from its own record of voting to block accountability, it has taken the name Save KPFA.

We, members of the original Save KPFA’s steering committee, strongly object to the use of our name. We have not endorsed this election slate, nor were we asked. We believe that the use of our name dilutes its historic meaning and is likely to confuse some voters, who may believe this slate stands for the same things we did.

We, members of the original Save KPFA’s steering committee, strongly object to the use of our name by the anti-reform slate that had previously called itself the KPFA Concerned Listeners.

We demand that this election slate stop using our name, or at least take steps to let any voters they have contacted know that it is separate group and not endorsed by us. We ask Pacifica also to take reasonable steps to make clear to subscribers that this election slate is a separate entity and not related to us or our positions and certainly not endorsed by us.

Author and journalist Jeffrey Blankfort – jblankfort@earthlink.net – distributed this story with the following note: “For those of you who have a deep and abiding interest in community, listener-sponsored radio and its inherent problems, I strongly recommend this article/letter, ‘Stealing Save KPFA,’ written by Curt Gray, one of the original members of Save KPFA, who has put together a remarkable history of the struggle that began 17 years ago to preserve the country’s first-listener sponsored station, a struggle that is still ongoing.”

BeyondChron misrepresents ‘Save KPFA’ slate on 2010 ballot with 1999 Save KPFA photo

Letter to the Editor by Sasha Futran

Dear BeyondChron Editors Randy Shaw and Paul Hogarth,

This is the photo initially used by BeyondChron to illustrate their story. It has since been replaced by a photo of the KPFA building entrance.

I’m truly disgusted with both of you, almost beyond words. The visual you chose for your article, “KPFA Election Will Decide Progressive Network’s Future,” published Sept. 13, has no connection to the slate you are endorsing and which is now confusing voters by running under another group’s name. Your use of a 1999 photo of that different group is beyond disingenuous.

Not only was the slate you continue to promote not members of Save KPFA in 1999, they stand for the exact opposite of what we wanted for the station. (I was a member of the steering committee of the original Save KPFA.) A slate’s sudden change to use of another group’s name in the current KPFA board election is misleading to voters. You and they aren’t stupid so I would guess you all know that.

Not only was the photo you chose a misrepresentation, your article was also filled with misinformation.

Several of us currently on the board and still involved with KPFA were organizing activists in 1999 as well and a part of the original group. That includes one of candidates running with the Independents for Community Radio, another slate and one with which I am affiliated.

Tracy Rosenberg kept the tent city that slept outside the station organized in the 1999 era of demonstrations. Those demonstrations led to a democratic change at the station and ended management’s lockout of KPFA’s staff.

Do not state or insinuate that either Ms. Rosenberg or the rest of us are against the paid staff. Do not malign us with your misrepresentations that are beyond all but right-wing media tactics. Do not attempt to further baffle voters.

Let’s look at your first paragraph and description of your favorite slate: “On one side is the Save KPFA slate of candidates, who believe the station should be the voice of the entire progressive community, and must expand listenership to help broaden the progressive base.”

Are you sure they can do that with a slate of primarily white males over the age of 60 on a slate put together by a group of Democratic Party activists? Many of their group – both presently on the board and currently running for the board – are also related or work together. I’d be interested in hearing how you think they are representative of the diverse Bay Area and can speak for people not only of their generation, ethnicity or political affinity, but also not members of their family and office staff as well.

Let’s move on to what you insinuate we, Independents for Community Radio, want to do – without checking with us; another mistake that an honest journalist wouldn’t make – “A victory by the Independents will likely usher in massive downsizing at KPFA, eliminating popular programming and replacing the current paid, unionized on-air staff with all volunteers.”

First, let’s remember that I already pointed out that we were the ones involved with ending the lockout of paid staff in 1999. Now on to the present. The group you are so fond of held the board majority for three of the not quite four years I have been on the board. As such, they passed station budgets that had known spending deficits each year in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They ran through KPFA’s entire cash reserve of a million dollars as a result. They were told by Pacifica to cut spending and instead added paid positions and moved staff around in a way that benefitted people on our board and members of their group or supported them within the station. They ended up with new or better jobs at KPFA. KPFA ended up with more, not fewer, expenditures.

When they were the majority on the board, Concerned Listeners – now calling themselves Save KPFA – ran through KPFA’s entire cash reserve of a million dollars.

Today we are dealing with that legacy. This week the station borrowed money from another Pacifica station to meet the payroll. Will there need to be a different budget or can we continue spending at the same rate? The answer should not be beyond your comprehension. Before I forget, I guess that little detail about borrowing money also does away with your favorite slate’s claim that KPFA is supporting other Pacifica stations.

Will the now unavoidable budget cuts have an effect on paid staff? Of course, since salaries and benefits are the single largest budget item by far. Will that happen if your favorite slate is in the majority? Of course, since salaries and benefits are the single largest budget item by far. Who brought us to this point? Of course, your favorite slate.

We can’t afford this public political board election bickering. Think fox and hen house. We need to move beyond thinking those who have almost killed the station will keep it alive in the future. Every effort will be made to keep as much paid staff as possible by Independents for Community Radio and to remove the foxes.

Your willful disregard for how KPFA got to its present precarious state does not belong in journalism even if it is only on a blog site and pseudo-journalism. It is beyond the pale.

Sasha Futran is a member of the KPFA Local Station Board and Independents for Community Radio. She can be reached at kpfasasha@yahoo.com.

Learn more at SAN FRANCISCO BAY VIEW NATIONAL BLACK NEWSPAPER.

[3]  If memory serves your author, Dr. Frederic S. Lee, a former professor at your author’s alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, actually coined the term heterodox economics to emphasise the heretical nature of challenging the underlying assumptions of neoclassical economics.

My colleague and personal friend wrote a memorial for our beloved Dr. Fred Lee, In memoriam: Frederic S. Lee (1949-2014), el adiós a un “economista blasfemo”[*].  The title translates from the Spanish to In memoriam: Frederic S. Lee (1949-2014), farewell to a blasphemous economist.  (I’ll have to translate my friend’s poignant and informative memorial for Dr. Lee from the Spanish into the English, for our Spanish language learners.)

***

[Image of The Atlantic magazine cover by Source used via Fair use.]

[12 SEP 2016]

[Last modified  23:18 PDT  14 SEP 2016]

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