LWF: Noam Chomsky- The Purpose of Education

Source:LWF- Professor Noam Chomsky. 

“Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment.

Presented at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference – Jan 25th 2012- London (LWF 12)”

Source:LWF

Source:LWF- MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.

The purpose of education is for people to learn what they need to know in order to be successful in life. Not teach them what to think, but how to think and how to learn so they can make the best out of all available important information out there.

What any successful democracy needs to be successful are people being able to learn and think for themselves, especially in a liberal democracy where information is more critical (I would argue) because we have more freedom to make our own decisions. Instead of living in a social democracy where more is expected from the central government to do for us.

The opposite of an educated, free society is a developing country, where there are simply not enough quality schools and educators to go around. And as a result you don’t have the educated workforce and consumer class needed to make your county a good investment. And as a result investors stay out of your country. Or an authoritarian state where the central government decides for everyone who lives there what people should know and what they should think. And for anyone who goes against that they are subjected to government sanctions.

A developed free society is an educated society. A society where people choose to live and stay, because it has the freedom and economic opportunity that people want and need to live well. And that starts first with parenting and then quality education. 

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The American Prospect: Robert Kuttner: 'When Public Is Better'

Source:Economic Policy Institute fellow Robert Kuttner.

"Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled "Passive Intervention." The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.

As Paul and his co-author, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, observed, the American welfare state is built on terrible, even disabling compromises. Progressives often lack the votes to pass legislation to deliver public benefits directly. So they either create tax incentives or bribe the private sector to do the job, thus inflating a bloated system. "The problem is not too much government activism," they wrote, "but too much passivity."

Their two emblematic examples were housing and health care. In housing, tax advantages became an inflation hedge for the affluent and drove up prices. Low-income homeownership programs, run through the private sector, had huge default rates. In health care, the political compromises necessary to enact Medicare excluded serious cost containment. When they wrote this, health care consumed 9 percent of GDP compared to 17 percent today. The subprime mortgage scandal was decades in the future.

After 34 years, the same dynamics are far worse. In the run-up to the financial collapse, private securitization of subprime mortgages pretended to serve the social objective of increasing low-income homeownership. Nobody fully understood the risks-not the brokers who originated the loans, or the banks that sliced them into bonds, or the credit-rating companies that blessed them, and certainly not the regulators who feigned oversight. In the aftermath of the collapse, government now gives "incentive payments" to the very banks that created the mess, bribing them to modify mortgages in the hope of reducing foreclosures. This privatized program is a byzantine mess and a policy failure.

Better to have a public institution, such as the Roosevelt-era Home Owners' Loan Corporation, serve the public goal of refinancing homes directly. The HOLC was simplicity and transparency itself. As was the original public Fannie Mae. Both programs sold Treasury bonds to create credit for homeowners. No private players took a cut or generated extra cost and risk, and there were no scandals.

Passive intervention-serving public goals by making them lucrative private profit centers-not only increases costs; it increases complexity, which in turn invites inflation, confusion, and corruption. Though private abuse is responsible, government as sponsor gets the political blame.

Depending on how vigilant the government is, the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") could be a partial step to universal insurance-or another epic passive intervention. Rather than having government provide coverage directly, as Medicare does, the ACA requires people to purchase private insurance, subsidized for less affluent people and regulated by government.

But the more indirect the government involvement, the more it invites gaming. The press has been full of stories of big companies trying to break into units of fewer than 50 employees to evade the law's threshold requirements and employers shifting full-time workers covered by the ACA to part-timers who are not. In Massachusetts, where the model for Obamacare was invented, the state tolerates employer-provided plans that leave consumers on the hook for a huge share of medical bills.

Over time, public Medicare has become far better than private plans at lowering costs. However the ACA is not a public program but a fragmented private insurance pool. In principle, the ACA allows the new state "health exchanges" to exert bargaining power over private plans, but they may also merely list and certify private insurance products. So this hybrid could add yet another layer, with little effect on cost.

Complexity invites more complexity. Foundations and industry groups have launched a $100 million nonprofit called Enroll-America.org to sign up uninsured people-who have every reason to be confused. Money is wasted explaining how to enroll in a bewildering system that could have been simple and automatic had it been public social insurance. The multiple moving parts also facilitate Republican mischief at every stage. As consumers grow frustrated with the complexity, cost, and incomplete coverage, guess who will take the blame?

The privatized drug insurance that trades on Medicare's good name (Medicare Part D) is yet another example of the inefficiency of passive intervention. Direct, public prescription coverage would provide more benefit at less cost, by excluding industry middlemen. One could add the inefficiencies and corruption of privatized prisons and halfway houses, or for-profit voucher schools that do worse than their public counterparts.

Government, of course, should not run everything. But when it comes to social outlays, simpler is better, and simpler usually means direct government provision. Alas, government is in such low repute nowadays that legislatively, passive intervention is all liberals can get. For instance, President Obama, in proposing universal pre-kindergarten, did not dare suggest simply extending public education to three- and four-year-olds. The best we can expect is a patchwork of church-basement programs and for-profit preschool franchises.

It's time-long past time-for progressives to call out the inefficiencies of private provision of public goods and make a clear-throated defense of government. Otherwise, our government will keep taking the fall for the failures of private profiteers." 

From The American Prospect

Shamus Cooke: 'Democrats & Labor: A Tale of Abuse'

Source:Counter Currents is a left-wing website.

"The Democratic Party’s participation in the recent national “sequester” cuts is yet another big dent in their love affair with organized labor. But break-ups are often a protracted process. Before a relationship ends there is usually a gradual deterioration based on irreconcilable differences, until the split becomes inevitable. The decades-long marriage of labor unions and the Democratic Party is nearing such a divorce. Labor unions are becoming frustrated as the Democrats flaunt their affair with corporate America and Wall Street.

What are some of the issues driving towards separation? It just seems that no matter how much labor leaders shower the politicians with money and affection, the Democrats just aren’t returning the love.

Although the Democrats were always a fickle partner, their coldness evolved into aggression under Bill Clinton, who oversaw a slew of anti-worker legislation, most notably NAFTA and welfare “reform.”

Obama has continued this rightwards trajectory, while portraying himself brilliantly as the “lesser evil” compared with the more honest anti-union rhetoric of the Republicans. He fulfilled none of his promises to labor in 2008, and essentially ignored all labor issues in his 2012 campaign. Labor leaders misinterpreted Obama as playing “hard to get,” when in fact the Democratic Party had already moved on.

To prove his fidelity to his new crush, Wall Street, Obama has made it a pet project to target the most powerful union in the country — the teachers’ union — for destruction. Obama’s innocent-sounding Race to the Top education reform is in actuality an anti-union dismembering of public education, with its promotion of charter schools and its mass closings of public high schools that Obama labels as “failing.” Bush, Jr.’s anti-union No Child Left Behind looks innocent compared to Obama’s education “reform.”

In fact, Obama has overseen the worst environment for organized labor since Ronald Reagan. But the problem is bigger than Obama. It’s the entire Democratic Party. For example, Democratic governors across the United States continue to work in tandem with Republicans in weakening public employee unions — the last bastion of real strength in the labor movement.

The Democrats have chosen to blame labor unions for the economic crisis and the consequent budget deficits affecting the states. These deficits have been used to attack the wages, health care, and pensions of public employees on a state-by-state basis, fundamentally weakening these unions while skewing the labor market in favor of the employers.

What some labor leaders fail to understand is that political parties like the Democrats are centralized organizations that share certain beliefs, and execute these ideas in a united fashion. It isn’t merely a coincidence that every Democratic governor in the United States has chosen a similar anti-labor path, its policy. There has been a fundamental shift in the Democratic Party’s relation to labor unions, and it is on display for everyone to see.

Not all labor leaders are feigning blindness to these facts. The president of the nation’s largest teachers’ union, Dennis Van Roekel, summarized teachers’ experience with the Obama Administration:

“Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced.” He was referring largely to Obama’s above-mentioned Race to the Top education program.

Van Roekel’s union, the National Education Association (NEA), also passed an excellent resolution at their national convention blasting Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, for his anti-public education and anti-union policies.

But of course Arne Duncan is simply implementing the policies of his boss, President Obama. And Obama is simply implementing the policies of his boss, corporate America, which is insisting that market relations are imposed on public education. After passing the above resolution, the NEA leadership shamefully pressured its membership to campaign for the Obama Administration, akin to a survivor of domestic violence going to bat for the batterer.

The president of the large national public employee union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Lee Saunders, also lashed out against the Democrats recently:

I am sick and tired of the fair-weather Democrats. They date us, take us to the prom, marry us, and then divorce us right after the honeymoon. I am sick and tired of the so-called friends who commend us when they’re running for election, but condemn us after they’ve won. I am sick and tired of the politicians who stand with us behind closed doors, but kick us to the curb in front of the cameras. I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit and we’re not gonna take it anymore.

Accurate remarks, but they were limited to a couple of select Democratic mayors and governors. Again, there is more than a “few bad apple” Democrats who are anti-labor; the whole party is sick with this cancer.

In private, all labor leaders acknowledge this fact. Politico reports:

Top labor leaders excoriated President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in a closed session of the AFL-CIO’s executive board meeting…Furious union presidents complained about budget cuts, a new [free] trade agreement and what some view as their abandonment, even by their typically reliable allies among Senate Democrats.

Presidents of several unions and an AFL-CIO spokesman declined to repeat their private criticism to a reporter Tuesday, a sign that labor feels it must still try to maintain a relationship with the Democratic Party, even if it’s deeply troubled.

So while the presidents of these unions speak honestly amongst themselves, they feel obligated to mis-educate their membership about the above facts. Labor leaders consistently minimize the Democrats’ role in anti-union policies, while exaggerating any morsel that can be construed to be pro-union. A mis-educated union membership makes for a weakened union movement.

When President Obama gave a largely right-wing state of the union address that included more corporate free trade agreements, more education “reform,” cuts to Medicare, and no plan to address the ongoing jobs crisis, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka responded shamefully by saying:

Tonight, President Obama sent a clear message to the world that he will stand and fight for working America’s values and priorities.

Again, Trumka knows better. He should tell union members the truth. The AFL-CIO and other unions have lied about President Obama’s role in the national “sequester” cuts, blaming the whole thing on the Republicans. The truth, however, is that Obama formed the “the deficit reduction committee” that gave birth to the sequester. He failed to take any significant action to prevent the cuts, because he agrees with them.

Rank-and-file union members aren’t stupid. They realize it when their paychecks shrink, when their health care costs skyrocket, when their pensions are destroyed, when they’re laid off, or when they campaign for Democrats who betray them post-election. Union leaders are creating distrust within their membership as they continue down a political road that has left labor weakened and politically tied to a “partner” that’s abusing it.

The Democrats have gone “all in” with Wall Street and the corporations. The big banks now feel as comfortable throwing campaign donations towards the Democrats as the Republicans. Labor unions can’t compete with Wall Street’s cash.

Breaking with the Democrats is long overdue. And once this is done union members will likely choose the path taken by labor unions in nearly every developed country: the creation of a labor party, with its own platform, funding, and member activists.

Such a party could appeal directly to all working people by demanding that a federal jobs program be immediately implemented to put those unemployed to work as well as fighting to save and expand Social Security and Medicare, while taxing the rich and corporations to fully fund public education and other social services. Such a platform would create a massive contrast to the mainstream corporate-bought parties that exist today, and thus attract millions of members and millions more voters." 

From Counter Currents

The American Prospect: Scott Lemieux: 'Fear & The New Deal'

Source:The American Prospect columnist Scott Lemieux.

"FDR ascended to the White House 80 years ago. How has his legacy—and the legacy of his landmark legislation—shifted in the years since?

In 1942, Congress passed legislation attempting to facilitate voting by soldiers stationed overseas. Passed too close to the date of the general election (and after the primary election season) and creating a cumbersome process, the bill was ineffective. As the number of American soliders overseas continued to increase, the lack of practical access to the ballot was intolerable to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He sent a bill to Congress in 1944 that would have created a simple federal ballot made it much easier for soldiers to make their voices heard. Despite having the authority of a wartime president, however, the bill failed. Congress instead passed a much weaker version, more similar to the 1942 statute, that did not send out a uniform federal ballot and left administration in the hands of the states. Fewer than 33 percent of eligible soldiers were able to vote in the 1944 elections. How, during the height of wartime, could such a basic democratic right be denied many soldiers risking their lives for their country?

The answer, as Ira Katznelson details in his brilliant new book Fear Itself, is that a coalition of Republicans (who believed that soldiers largely represented a pro-FDR demographic) and Southern Democrats (who feared that even this limited form of federal intervention would threaten Jim Crow) wanted to limit ballot access for soldiers. The clash between the imperatives of war and the constraints of congressional politics makes the failure of FDR's 1944 bill a paradigmatic New Deal story. Eighty years ago yesterday, FDR famously said during his First Inaugural Address that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The New Deal-which Katznelson argues should be seen as encompassing the period between the election of FDR in 1932 and the election of Eisenhower 20 years later-was, according to Fear Itself, conducted in the shadow of three major fears. First, there was the fear about whether democracy could survive the Great Depression as countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan turned to authoritarian responses. Second, there was the fear protecting national security respresented, first by World War II and then by the Cold War and the atomic age. And third, and crucially, was the Southern fear that its system of white supremacy would not survive. The first two fears created an impetus for unprecedented federal action, but this federal action was, throughout the New Deal, shaped and constrained by the third fear.

One of the many strengths of Fear Itself is that it brings Congress back to center stage in the New Deal era. American politics past tend to be retrospectively seen through the lens of the presidency, an impulse that is particularly understandable with respect to FDR, who almost certainly did more to shape the political landscape than any politician of the last century. And yet, FDR (and, to an even greater extent) Truman were frequently constrained by Congress, with expansions of executive power often made at the initiative of Congress. And the importance of congressional power meant power for the Jim Crow South-because liberal Democrats never constituted a majority by themselves even in an era in which Democrats generally had huge majorities in both houses of Congress, southern Democratic support was frequently needed for legislation to pass. And because the one-party South meant lengthy tenures for many key southern congressmen, Southern Democrats used control the committee system to gain even more influence over the congressional agenda than their raw numbers would indicate. This influence was, of course, largely pernicious. As the opening story about the denial of ballot access to soldiers indicates, the most important impact of the ability of the Solid South to act as a veto point was that New Deal legislation had to be perceived as leaving Southern white supremacy undisturbed. As a result, the African-Americans who most needed New Deal benefits were given a disproportionately small share.

The New Deal required, as Katznelson puts it, "pragmatic forgetfulness" on the part of FDR and northern liberals in Congress about the horrific injustices of the apartheid South. The pension and unemployment systems established by the Social Security Act, for example, purposely excluded predominantly African-American agricultural and domestic workers from benefits, and this policy of racial exclusion was exacerbated by decentralized control that led to more discriminatory enforcement. Southern Democrats were also crucial to overriding Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, which devastated the American labor movement and intentionally broadened the definitions of agricultural and domestic work in ways that made it much more difficult for African-Americans to organize. And yet-nothing about the politics of the New Deal is straightforward-the influence of Southern Democrats was not uniformly negative. From 1933 to 1938, Southern Democrats were strong supporters of many New Deal initiatives. This support was not simply a matter of being cowed by FDR's use of the bully pulpit or arm-twisting. As Katznelson points out, even Theodore Bilbo, the cartoonishly demagogic racist senator from Mississippi, supported progressive economic policy as a state politician. (The Deep South in the 1930s was too poor to afford economic libertarianism.) There were even times when Southern Democrats staked out a position to FDR's left-most notably, attaching a major public works program to the Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 that FDR (who never fully abandoned his fiscally conservative instincts) didn't want.

Particularly important and complex, as the fears of fascist domination of Europe and then nuclear annihilation took center stage, is the role of Southern Democrats in national security policy. Southern Democrats were crucial to overcoming Republican isolationism and facilitating a robust American intervention into World War II. Somewhat surprisingly, Katznelson argues, the public officials and editorial boards who most supported white supremacy at home were also among the most committed to fighting the (admittedly even more extreme) version abroad. However, the commitment of Southern Democrats to the national-security state also persisted in its more dangerous aspects. The growth of the security state and its ongoing threats to civil liberties and lives, Katznelson reminds us, was not a simple matter of presidential usurpation: "Every key building block of the national security state that was developed during the Truman years required and secured congressional approval." Southern Democrats were often crucial to overcoming the opposition of isolationist Republicans and liberal Democrats and building the militar-industrial complex.

One of the many virtues of this masterful book is that it rescues the tragedies and ironies of the New Deal from the facile "liberal fascism" taunts from the likes of Jonah Goldberg. American political institutions may have demanded a Faustian bargain in return for comprehensive Great Depression policies, but that does not discredit the progressive accomplishments of the New Deal. White supremacy constrained and shaped the New Deal because in the early 20th century American polity, white supremacy and the tolerance of white supremacy were nearly ubiquitous among political elites of all ideological stripes. From William Howard Taft's disavowal of any interest in civil rights to the overwhelming Senate Republican opposition to allowing an anti-lynching bill to come up a vote to the conservative coalition that dominated Congress between 1938 and 1964, racism was hardly something that only affected the Democratic coalition. And it was economic progressives, not conservatives, who ultimately embraced civil rights under Lyndon Johnson."

From The American Prospect

Hubert Humphrey: '1948 Civil Rights Speech'

Source:American Speeches- Minneapolis, Minnesota Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, at the 1948 Democratic National Convention.

"Hubert Humphrey gave this speech supporting civil rights, causing 35 delegates from Mississippi and Alabama to walk out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention. Humphrey urged the Democratic Party to "get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights".  When President Truman endorsed this civil rights plank, governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond helped organize the walkout of delegates into a separate party. The party Thurmond formed was called the "Dixiecrats" and it's racist slogan was "Segregation Forever!". 

From American Speeches

To know that Hubert Humphrey was a great man, all you have to do is look at or watch his 1948 Democratic National Convention speech on civil rights and to know that he was also ahead of his time. 

Just look at or listen to Hubert Humphrey's civil rights speech and this was even before he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Humphrey wasn't in Congress at all when he gave this speech (House or Senate) but a 1948 U.S. Senate candidate. 

And also to know how far ahead of his time he was, the civil rights movement didn't exist at all in the late 1940s at least as a national movement. But to a large extent at least on civil rights, Humphrey wasn't governed by what was popular at the time when he was the Deputy Leader of the U.S. Senate in 1964 and pushing the civil rights laws then. 

Civil rights was still not very popular in this country and Senator Humphrey in 1964 probably already knew and Lyndon Johnson certainly knew that passing civil rights laws was going to hurt the Democratic Party in the South and thats exactly what happened.

Leadership is not about what's doing what is popular at the time but what's the right thing to do at the time. And thats exactly what Hubert Humphrey did with this civil rights speech in 1948. And what he did in his entire career in Congress in the 1940s, 50s and 60s and civil rights is just an example of that.

Politzane: 'Wealth Inequality in America'

Source:POLITIZANE with a look at what left-wingers call wealth inequality.

"Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is." 

From POLITIZANE

My guess my main point and response to this is: who gets to decide what's fair when it comes to income distribution? I guess technically the government and the people who are elected to represent us. But those folks by-in-large, aren't saying that it's somehow unfair that doctors and lawyers are millionaires, while janitors, bus driver, taxi drivers, etc, the workers who might only need a high school diploma, if that, to do their job, work really hard, just to pay their bills. 

There are exceptions to every rule, like people inheriting wealth, marrying wealth, etc. But by-in--large, with our liberal democratic, capitalist system, you get out of this economy, what you put into it. You get yourself a good education, you develop your talents and then apply them really well, you are probably going to do very well in America. But if you don't, perhaps you didn't even finish high school, life for you will probably be a major struggle. But there are exceptions to that rule as well, like with entertainers and people who marry up. And I don't see what's unfair about that. 

Akshay Pahilajani: Professor Noam Chomsky- On Liberalism (1977)

Source:Akshay Pahilajani- MIT Professor Noam Chomsky talking about liberalism in 1977.

“Noam Chomsky on Liberalism. Excerpt from a BBC interview in 1977”

Source:Akshay Pahilajani

I like what Professor Chomsky said early on in this video, because that’s exactly what I could base this entire piece around. This one point where he says that liberalism when it was first developed was anti-establishment (And I would add anti-centralization of power)

What Professor Chomsky is essentially talking about what’s called classical liberalism. I don’t call it classical liberalism myself, as a Liberal, but that’s what the so-called mainstream media, as well as closeted Socialists or Leftists, who don’t like those terms. So they call what used to be just known as liberalism, neoliberalism or classical liberalism.

But what has always been known as liberalism, before leftists (democratic and otherwise tried to hijack the philosophy) has been a political philosophy that’s built around advancing individual, human rights and defending liberty for all, not some, but for everybody. Not about advancing the state and the role of the state, especially the national state, believing that the more power and money that the national government has, the better off everyone will be. Which is what Socialists (democratic and otherwise) believe, not real Liberals. 

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