Dennis Loo's Open Salon Blog

The Battle Over Higher Education in California

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:11:33 -0500

New York Times photo from UCLA

Over the last several days, the battle in California has escalated over the “budget crisis” and the massive cuts, layoffs, and fee increases in the university system - the largest university system in the world. At UCLA, over a thousand students, faculty, and others created a righteous ruckus on Wednesday and Thursday, setting up a tent city, occupying a building for one day, taking to the streets, the inside, and outside, of campus buildings, stopping street traffic, and surrounding members of the UC Board of Regents who had just raised student fees by 32%, telling them “Shame on you!” The police had to come and forcefully create a cordon for the regents so that they could leave the scene of their crime. Actions at other California university campuses were also held, with 1,000 at Berkeley and hundreds at UC Santa Cruz and at other UC campuses, with various determined actions taking place on Thursday and previously at CSU (California State University) campuses.

On my campus, Cal Poly Pomona, on Thursday, the same day as the Board of Regents meeting and rowdy UCLA actions, a walkout and teach in were held that involved close to 700 attendees. (Here is a short video that shows a slice of the action at Cal Poly). As I sat waiting to speak during the program I watched and listened as students led chants and raised signs and their collective voice. My eyes, I’m not ashamed to say, welled up just looking at the protest because of the power that was being expressed and because this manifestation of collective energy has been too long in coming. My colleague, Political Science Professor Jose Vadi, who was also on the program as a speaker, leaned over to me and told me that this was the most vigorous Cal Poly demonstration he’d ever seen. Vadi recently retired after teaching at Cal Poly for thirty-eight years. During his speech he saluted the students for their actions, expressing the hope that this was the beginning of a very important shift, and called for them to take this out into the communities as ambassadors for higher education.

The powerful program interwove rousing speeches with stirring poetry and dynamic music. The stage crackled. Some students spoke of revolution. Students in the front row off the stage danced in protest and celebration. I witnessed this wondering if this was a turning point: will the all-too quiescent campuses become hotbeds of political life again? Will the battle be engaged in the fight against those who want to run higher education like a straight up business? Will the war against dismantling the current education system and replacing it with a system only the more well-to-do can access be won or lost? Will such a fight also lead to students becoming more aware of their power to impact other, intimately related, political issues of these times? Will students rise to the mission of their generation, or not?

It was wonderful to see the students at Cal Poly and to know that UCLA was kicking butt in Westwood simultaneously. If the student movement grows, then all things become possible – not just a movement about education, but against these unjust, ongoing wars and Bush’s monstrous policies now being continued and legitimized by Obama.

On the next day, Friday, November 19, 2009, Cal Poly’s Faculty Senate Chair sent around a message to all faculty, passing on a directive from the CSU system Chancellor Charley Reed and our campus Provost. Before showing you an excerpt from that letter, it would be helpful for readers to know how severe the situation for students and faculty and staff in the CSU and UC systems is already, before the far more draconian cuts being planned for the immediate future that include abolishing and/or merging programs and departments. Almost all students are having difficulty getting into classes that they need, and some students are literally unable to get into any of the classes they need. Enrollment is being cut by 40,000 in the CSU system. Entering and staying in the CSU or UC, let alone graduating on time, are now real problems, causing great distress for most students. Faculty voted narrowly several months ago to approve a voluntary furlough for this school year in the hopes that a pay cut of over 9% (on top of a pay raise that was supposed to be given to us this past summer that wasn’t and salaries that are still well below comparable institutions) would save some jobs for lecturers (aka adjunct faculty). I say in “hopes” because the Chancellor’s Office refused to promise anything before the vote, despite faculty and our union, the CFA (California Faculty Association), trying our damndest to get an indication of what a yes vote on a furlough would accomplish. Despite this vote on sheer faith by faculty, lecturer ranks continue to be reduced, after massive layoffs at the end of the last school year.

For those outside of higher education: lecturers teach a very large proportion of classes offered, generally one-half or more of the total classes taught. Replacements for tenured and tenure track faculty who have retired or left has either been frozen (as it was last year) or curtailed. As part of the ongoing agenda for administrators to create a more “flexible,” and therefore, more easily controlled, workforce, tenure ranks have been diminishing and lecturer ranks growing for years. Lecturers are not only paid less, they also receive fewer benefits and less job security. Class size, as a result, continues to rise. In the thirteen years that I have been teaching at Cal Poly, average class sizes in my department (where we have and have had the highest, by a substantial margin, student to faculty ratios in our college) have gone from the low 30s to now 48. An English faculty member at UCLA who teaches a poetry class told a local NPR affiliate radio host a few months ago that he once taught 400 students with the help of 20 graduate teaching assistants who taught discussion sections, but now has to teach 800+ students without the help of any TA’s. My waitlists for courses I teach are now several times larger than they have ever been, with twelve people waitlisted for a class of 48. Some colleagues in other departments have described extraordinarily long wait lists.

It is in that context that the following excerpt from the Friday, November 19, 2009 email should be read. The CSU Chancellor in this letter says that he wants to increase graduation rates and bridge the achievement gap. He says this, incredibly, while at the same time he is continuing to slash the budget, reducing faculty ranks, and raising student fees, doing all of the things, in other words, that are the very opposite of what you would be doing if you wanted to accomplish the goals he says he wants to accomplish. The only way you could possibly acheive his goal would be to further dumb down the curriculum. If his directive weren’t serious, it would be understandable if people took it to be satire about this budget crisis. To add insult to injury, the Chancellor wanted recommendations by December 25, 2009, an impossible timetable even if faculty really wanted to have input and thought that the process would take their input into serious account.

“A key goal of the CSU’s strategic plan, Access to Excellence, is the effort to address graduation rates. Unless things change, there are likely to be over a million fewer college graduates in the coming decades than the number needed to sustain California’s economy. Particularly troubling is the achievement gap, the differences between the graduation rates of low income and under-represented minority students and their peers.

“The chancellor's office has developed a new initiative to deliver results on graduation rates, particularly raising overall achievement and narrowing achievement gaps. In a two-day Executive Council meeting, presidents and provosts met with Sir Michael Barber and his team. In Tony Blair's second term as Prime Minister of Britain, Barber led a ‘Delivery Team’ which reported to the Prime Minister and worked with government agencies to deliver on specific goals - things like increasing the on-time performance of trains, reducing emergency room waiting times, and raising literacy levels in British schools. The strategies Barber's Delivery Team used have been applied successfully in delivering on public goals in several countries and states.”

The letter does not go on to announce that the Chancellor wants to restore funding to the university in order to facilitate this.

A Google search under Sir Michael Barber’s name and his concoction “Deliverology” produces finds such as this:

“Barber set up and ran the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) – a misnomer, since it didn’t deliver; instead it established a coercive regime to force others to comply.” (John Seddon, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, Triarchy Press, p. vii).

“Durham University’s Peter Tymms … concluded that the statistical procedures behind the startling results on which Barber had built his reputation for delivery were faulty. When the statistical error was corrected the results flattened out. Tymms drew parallels with the US state of Texas, where similarly spectacular results had been achieved, only for ‘the Texas miracle’ to be revealed as an illusion. He attributed the dramatic improvements to the teachers ‘teaching to the test’ and concluded that the same was happening in England.” (Seddon, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, referring to Peter Tymms, “Are Standards Rising in English Primary Schools?” British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4, August 2004 pp. 477-494.)

“Take primary school Sats as an example. No matter that many teachers have had serious reservations about the key stage 1 and 2 tests, that there is plenty of evidence to show that some of the improvements are down to teachers teaching to the tests and that, at the very least, year 6 has become more about making sure the primary school gets the necessary results to preserve its league-table position than ensuring children get a fulfilling and rounded education. ‘People have always made dire predictions about Sats,’ [Barber] says. ‘They said that by concentrating on getting 80% of pupils to achieve level 4, the numbers reaching level 5 would be reduced. This didn't happen. They said that focusing on English and maths would detract from science. It didn't. And the notion that schools are teaching to the tests is nonsense; schools that did that would get worse results, as their kids would be bored.’" (“Rose-Tinted Memoirs”)

No Child Left Behind is the US equivalent of Sir Barber’s “Deliverology” in Britain. NCLB has produced the same compulsions, teachers who no longer have time to teach and who are forced to prepare students for high-stakes tests by teaching them, either directly or close to, the answers to the questions, rather than training them to think. (The consequences of this I see in my students who have a harder time identifying what is important and how to master a corpus of material, not through any fault of their own, but because they have been trained so much by having their hands held and being told what the answer is). Notice that Barber dismisses the criticism that his Deliverology is producing teaching to the test without Barber thinking that he needs to do any actual investigation into the charge. As Seddon notes of this “reform” at p. iv:

“There are now many thousands of people engaged in telling others what to do and inspecting them for compliance. Public services have requirements placed on them by a plethora of bodies, the biggest single weakness of which, common to them all, is that they are based on opinion rather than knowledge. The regime, ignorant of this essential shortcoming, legitimises the role of the many specifiers by giving them the power to demand compliance. This is dysfunctionality of a high order.”

For higher education faculty in the US, the thousands engaged in telling us what to do and inspecting us for compliance is what educator managers call “assessment.”

If I were to invent a rationale to show why the Chancellor and his gang are an ongoing disaster for higher education and why they need to be forced out, I could not have come up with a more telling and powerful example than the fact that the Chancellor and all of the CSU presidents and provosts have endorsed (and are no doubt paying, during a financial crisis, when academic affairs divisions are being slashed to the marrow, very fat fees to) Sir Michael Barber. It apparently never occurred to our Chancellor to ask his own faculty what they think would work and would help. After all, what do the people who actually teach students know about teaching?

The battle over higher education in California is really a battle over the shape of the future, not just in California but for the country.

* * *

The following is the short speech that I delivered at Thursday’s Cal Poly action:

In the 1950s and 1960s California boasted the nation’s best school system at the K-12 level. It was the model for the country. As a result of government policies that began being instituted in the late 1970s, however, California’s schools have been sliding progressively downhill. Our K-12 schools are now at the bottom in the nation, along with Mississippi and Guam. Higher education for its part is now under threat of being transformed into something unrecognizable, damaged in the same way that K-12 has been.

Why is this happening?

The present crisis did not come about just because of the deep recession. This recession and this crisis in education are the logical outcome of policies that privilege those with a lot against those with much less. These policies trump private interests and private goods over public goods and public interests.

This crisis, in other words, is an induced crisis.

Disinvesting in public goods such as higher education has become the dominant US public policy over the last thirty or so years. The crown jewel of this policy in California is Prop 13, passed in 1978, that not only froze property taxes for senior citizens, itself a worthy idea, but also, and here is the unworthy part, reduced taxes for business. Capitol Records, for example, pays 50 cents/sq ft v. a small house valued at $300k pays as much as 60x that rate. Prop 13 reduced property taxes by 57% and it also made tax increases impossible unless 2/3 supported them in both chambers of the legislature.

Schools receive their primary funding from property taxes.

People like CSU Chancellor Charley Reed say that there is no money for the CSU in Sacramento, but somehow there is the money to pay his salary of $452,000 plus a free house and free car and gas. [Loud groans and expressions of shock from the audience] This is more than two times what Obama is paid. Somehow there has been the money to allot Cal Poly Pomona administrators as a whole 50% more since [Mike] Ortiz has been president [of Cal Poly], while lecturers and tenure track faculty ranks are whittled away and our pay is cut and student fees and class sizes balloon each year.

Personal benefits vs. group benefits. Those who already have a lot v. those with increasingly little.

Another glaring example of privileging private interests over public interests is the fact that California is the only place in the nation that doesn’t tax oil companies for extracting petroleum. If AB 656 in the state legislature passes, the funds from this extraction tax would fully fund the entire California university system.

Wouldn’t you think then that the CSU and UC administrators would be lobbying Sacramento hard for AB 656? Guess what? They oppose it. The oil companies are making record profits in the tens of billions per quarter. That’s profits, not revenue. Profits of tens of billions every three months. The money is there. But the money isn’t going where it should. Fat cats eat lobster and steak and the rest of us can just “eat cake,” as Marie Antoinette so famously said.

There is no reason why the university system should be starving. The university faces draconian cuts because corporate interests have been strangling the people of California for their own selfish purposes.

Reed’s solution is to make professors teach an extra class each semester. He says that this would be amazingly “efficient.” See, that’s the problem: the CSU Chancellor thinks that the universities are businesses. Administrators want to run it like a for-profit business. They want to radically transform higher education and make it into a business in which private concerns can make lots and lots of money and the rest of us can just “eat cake.”

Education is a public good. It is wrong and unseemly to prostitute education as a business for sale to the highest bidder.

If the same people and policies that have driven us to this crisis are allowed to get their way, then the interests of the people, you, me, your families and future students and their families will be irreparably harmed. The fight that we are engaged in is a fight over what vision will prevail. Is it going to be the fat cats and their dreams of $$$ or is it going to be faculty and students, who are the university? [Cheers] We have no choice but to take up the mantle of responsibility to fight for a very different vision because if we don’t then the wrong side will win. We have to provide the leadership and the vision. We have to win the battle for public opinion. So much is riding on this. As California goes, so goes the nation. We are a bellwether. Which will it be?

Holder and Obama: “Taking Ultimate Steps Towards Justice”

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:11:51 -0500

Attorney General Eric Holder, on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 in testimony before the US Senate:

“At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is in federal court. By bringing prosecutions in both our courts and military commissions, by seeking the death penalty, by holding these terrorists responsible for their actions, we are finally taking ultimate steps towards justice."

Compare what the Wall Street Journal reported on July 8, 2009:

“The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission.

“Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department's chief lawyer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would make based on their estimate of whether the prisoner posed a future threat.â€¨â€¨

“Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.”

If trying people in federal court is taking an ultimate step towards justice, then why has Obama stated that even if someone is finally tried and found innocent, even in the kangaroo court of the Military Commissions, as opposed to just being held and tortured, that Obama may very well still continue to hold this adjudicated innocent person indefinitely? How is that any kind of justice?

Obama's Counter-Terror Chief: We Need to Do It Secretly

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:11:12 -0500

On Meet the Press the Sunday after 9/11, Vice-President Cheney famously stated:

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies – if we are going to be successful.”

***

On November 5, 2009, the Harvard Law Record ran an article about Obama’s National Counterterrorism Chief Michael Leiter’s talk at Harvard Law School. Leiter, like Obama, is a Harvard Law School graduate (class of 2000). Leiter’s remarks, as far as I can tell, have not been reprinted anywhere.

This is an excerpt from the article:

“Finally, and most controversially, Leiter said that everything counterterrorism did would require a large degree of public trust. He believed transparency would undermine such trust, making it difficult for counterterrorism policymakers to operate. Much needed to happen behind the scenes, he said, citing the use of provisions of the Patriot Act to foil a recent bomb plot against New York City subways, and noting that, in terms of international operations, there ‘was no altruism in international affairs,’ and that difficult and delicate trade-offs were often made in the pursuit of security.

“Returning to his third major lesson, Leiter said that, in the absence of public oversight, lawyers ought to play a greater role ensuring that there is accountability for any action taken behind the scenes. [Like John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, and Jay Bybee?] A breakdown of the internal channels set up by the Church and Pike Commissions in the 1970s – specifically, a lack of trust in the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and the special courts set up to monitor use of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) is what has led members of Congress to leak vital information to the press, rather than deal with problems within the system. ‘Everything now plays out on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post,’ Leiter said, making it difficult for the NCTC and other national security agencies to pursue effective policies.

“Leiter’s position on secrecy may reflect the fact that he is a legacy of the Bush administration, which first appointed him to his position in 2008. Still, he insists, his job has not changed much since Obama took office. 98% of his work, Leiter said, was ‘apolitical;’ it was just that 'the discourse' in the media focused on the hard cases that were not. ‘In the New York Times counterterrorism is Guantanamo, torture, and assassinations,’ Leiter said. What had truly shifted between administrations, he observed, was the weight given to the needs and desires of different departments – Defense, in particular, had received more attention under Bush than Obama.”

***

I’m so happy that Mr. Change decided to keep his fellow Harvard Law School grad Mr. Leiter on and that working Cheney’s “dark side” has not taken a backseat to the transparency that Obama argued for as a candidate and still claims that he stands for as president.

Makes me feel all warm inside that my government is doing things that it can’t tell me. It's better that way.

Sunsara Taylor and the "Ethical" Humanist Society of Chicago

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 20:11:08 -0500

Note: As those of us know who have been watching with increasing alarm the repressive, inflamed, violent, and fascistic atmosphere that was whipped up during the unlawful tenure of Bush in the White House, and that has escalated since Obama's taking the presidency, emanating from the studios of Fox News et al and pulpits, the rule of reason, law, fairness, justice and morality have become endangered species:

Outrageous lies and monstrous immoral policies (including torture and pre-emptive wars of aggression) emanate from the highest offices of the land;

an abortion doctor is murdered in his own Church and Christian leaders and reactionaries like Bill O'Reilly excuse and justify the deeds of the murderer;

the government has been openly spying upon all of us - including everyone in Congress and State Houses - for years and getting away with it;

the presidency itself was stolen in plain sight in 2000 and 2004 and the irrefutable and massive evidence for it is swept under the rug;

con men dressed in expensive suits and thieves on Wall Street take the economy to the brink of catastrophe and, when bailed out by taxpayers upon threat of martial law if they're not, continue their previous malevolent ways and pocket tens of billions in bonuses;

dissidents and protestors are dubbed "low-level terrorists" by the Department of Defense;

habeas corpus, the right to challenge your detention, is nullified;

Obama, the man of change and hope, counsels common ground with Christian fascists, decides that not only is he going to defend the torture and murders committed by Bush in courts when the victims of this sue, continue rendition and massive, warrantless surveillance, but he will continue to hold detainees in this cursed war of terror even if they have been acquitted.

In this atmosphere, people who dare to hew to the truth, no matter how unfashionable and personally hazardous, and insist on standing on the high moral ground, refusing to adopt the craven slavishness of convenience and expedience, are terribly precious. The majority of Americans and the majority of the world do not support the fascist wind being whipped up. But they are feeling beleaguered and helpless. In such a situation those who are brave enough to stand up in the face of these windstorms and raise the banner of resistance are exceedingly important, for they voice the inchoate sentiments of many. This is the story of what follows below.

As the organizer of Sunsara's Chicago tour put it:

"People are looking at this whole sick situation and think there must be some more reasonable explanation, it is just too bizarre -- and, too frightening. But this is the unvarnished truth. Best to look at it. This is the logic that gets unleashed when censorship leads to lies to justify it; where anti-communist fear and distancing generate more fear and hysteria. People get vilified and driven off committees. Others get scared and shut up, or lose heart and patience for the arduous struggle to guard the truth and stand on principle against this."

By Sunsara Taylor (from her blog, 11/6/09)

Why I Was Dis-Invited, Why I Did Not Just Shut Up And Go Away, and Why It Still Matters

The woman who coordinated my speaking engagements in Chicago has written an account of what transpired leading up to and on the day of my cancelled talk, November 1st, 2009. This includes a robust eye-witness defense of my videographer who was brutalized and arrested. Please read her statement here: [http://sunsara.blogspot.com/2009/11/true-story-of-sunsara-taylor-and.html] as well as the statement from a lawyer who was present here [http://sunsara.blogspot.com/2009/11/statement-from-attorney-martha-conrad.html] and join in demanding the charges be dropped!

My invitation to speak at the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago traces back to a talk that I gave on a panel at Columbia College last year entitled, “A Communist, A Buddhist and a Priest Sit Down to Discuss... Morality to Change the World: With or Without God(s)?” [which you can listen to here and here].

The diversity of views among the panelists, along with robust challenges and deep questions from the audience, made this an exhilarating evening. I spoke openly of being a communist. Drawing from Bob Avakian's book, Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, I brought alive how his further development of communism places great importance on the need for the methods and means of all who struggle for liberation to be rooted in, and consistent with, our ends. In other words, if we want a world where the needs of humanity are valued above individual gain, where women are fully liberated, where all people and a diversity of cultures are respected and valued, and where critical thinking, the unfettered search for the truth, and individuality are fostered – then we must begin to live this morality now and we must struggle to bring that world into being. Others spoke from their own perspectives. Hundreds of students and others stayed long after the scheduled end, standing in the back and squeezing in on the floor in front.

That night, a member of the EHSC Program Committee approached me and let me know that he intended to approach other members of his Committee and invite me to speak.

Anyone who googles “Sunsara Taylor” can see quite easily that when I speak of morality I speak as a communist. I expose the immorality of a global system based on profit, a system that has patriarchy and the oppression of women woven into its very fabric, a system that thrives off of wars of aggression and legalized torture.

In one of the easiest talks of mine to find online, an exchange with Chris Hedges entitled, “Atheism, God and Morality in a Time of Imperialism and Rising Fundamentalism,” I began with the story of Placide Simone, a Haitian woman who – like millions around the globe – was struck hard by the recent global food crisis. I quoted news coverage, “'Take one,' she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. 'You pick. Just feed them.'” I made the connections between this real world nightmare and the “need” people feel for the illusory comfort that religion provides in the almost unimaginably unbearable condition of vast swaths of humanity under imperialist globalization. I further argued that religion, the weight of tradition and superstition (including the notion of “sin”), only adds to this suffering.

I speak publicly on these and other matters not, as some now claim, out of a desire to “be in the spotlight.” I do this because I understand that even people who today often close their eyes to truths that seem too difficult, too big, too disturbing to confront, can be won to open their eyes, to think, and to act. To find that part of them that, together with others and the irrefutable evidence of both what is wrong and of the possibility of change, can be part of making those changes to this world and to ourselves in the process.

All of this is informed by my worldview as a communist. At the same time, because this communist worldview is rooted in confronting the world as it actually is and as it actually can be, there is tremendous room for others, coming from their own worldviews but similarly committed to the betterment of humanity, to be enriched through an engagement with these views on morality.

From all this, it is clear that the EHSC knew I was a communist from the very beginning. But, as the date of my long-scheduled talk approached, some began a drive to cancel my talk exactly because of these views.

In his objections to allowing my approved talk to go forward, Anil Kashyap, the co-chair of the Program Committee of EHSC on October 13th wrote, “we specifically stipulated that it [her talk] was NOT supposed to focus on the revolutionary communism.” The actual focus of my talk, as it was clearly described and submitted to the EHSC, was to look at the profound changes that have been brought about by imperialist globalization and the moral crises this has contributed to, to look at the resurgence of virulent, fundamentalist religions in this context and to explore how this can be countered with a secular morality. Of course this was informed by my perspective as a communist.

In further arguing to cancel my talk, Anil Kashyap, who is also a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, wrote, “A talk that claims morality is inconsistent with a global economy is nonsense. The first order fact that cannot be ignored is that the greatest anti-poverty program in history is the growth in China over the last 30 years. That was only possible because of globalism. That transformation has lots of problems, but more starving and desperate people have been lifted up faster than ever in human history.”

This notion, that the last thirty years of capitalist restoration in China has been the “greatest anti-poverty program in history” is one I would have gladly disputed in an open exchange. I probably would have pointed out that between the years 1949 and 1976, under the leadership of Mao Tse-Tung, life expectancy in China rose from 32 to 65 years, medical care was brought to the vast country-side, women were brought into education, the workforce, and public life, and for the first time in the history of China the food problem was solved. I would probably have pointed out that since capitalism was restored in 1976, 200 million peasants have become displaced and now cast about through the country, vulnerable to the grossest forms of sweatshop exploitation and that by some estimates as many as 20 million women have been driven into the sex industry for mere survival. Kashyap might have challenged me and I would have responded. In my view, this would have been great – giving people the chance to compare and contrast and form their own views.

Rather than air his very different and strongly-held views on these issues, Kashyap and others argued for the cancellation of my speech. This is in keeping with, and contributes to, a broader chill on discourse that challenges the status quo and it is in keeping with a particularly virulent resurgence of anti-communist McCarthyism.

A member of Obama's team was recently pilloried for having once quoted Mao Tse-Tung, Glenn Beck regularly rants about so-called “communists” and “socialists” that are packed into the administration, and Obama himself is targeted as a “socialist” for considering any form of healthcare reform.

To be clear, I am no supporter of President Obama and Obama himself is no socialist or communist. But I am a communist and this has everything to do with why my talk was cancelled.

To the degree that this cancellation was driven by the fear of any association with an actual communist at a time when such associations are being used to discredit people and drive them from their jobs, this is neither ethical nor practical. One does not stop anti-communism and repression by capitulating to it. Such behavior only fuels the hysteria, encourages those on the witch-hunt, and intimidates others. To the degree that those who suppressed my talk did so out of fear that my challenge to the morality of capitalism might have resonated at a time when so many are experiencing such a profound crisis of confidence in capitalism, this is also indefensible. This cuts against stated principles of the EHSC as well as basic ethical standards.

Today, people everywhere are groaning under the weight and the horrors associated with the current world order. The female half of humanity is routinely beaten, raped, disrespected and demeaned in a thousand ways and from every side. Millions have been displaced and hundreds of thousands of lives have been stolen by U.S. wars just in recent years, with no end in sight. Hundreds of millions of children are caught up in life-draining labor, with no chance of a childhood and no prospects for a future of anything more than continued suffering. Here within the U.S., millions are forced out of their homes by foreclosure, an epidemic of police murder and brutality stalks the lives of Black and Latino youth, and the government routinely spies on its citizens emails, phone calls and public spaces. All of these, and countless other unnecessary nightmares, are part of the great moral dilemma of our times.

Yet, out of fear of conflict, out of fear of sacrifice, out of fear of standing out and having to struggle for one's principles and ethics, these and other crimes continue, even though millions disagree.

It is the phenomenon described so saliently in a poem by Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

All too often these days, people voice their disagreement with these wrongs... but then they go about their lives. They acquiesce. They tell themselves that they couldn't have won anyhow – but we can never really know that. Such “wise council” might have told the same thing to the Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights Movement, the soldiers who refused to fight in Vietnam, or the women who won the right to abortion.

Today, progressive and radical thinkers across the country are routinely dis-invited, their speech is routinely suppressed, they are pressured to self-censor, they are fired or denied tenure, and the discourse of this society is routinely kept within “safe” limits that do not challenge a bloody status quo.

To go along with this, and to contribute to this, is to do great harm. Indeed, the ideas that are allowed to circulate in society and the ideas that are suppressed, have everything to do with whether the crimes of this world will be allowed to continue or whether these will be called out, resisted and stopped.

I ask that each of you reading this now add your voice against this act of suppression. Spread this letter. Send statements to the addresses below. Help open up a platform to these all-too-infrequently heard ideas by inviting me to speak. Write and call the EHSC and the Skokie police department to demand that charges be dropped against my videographer.

Contact the EHSC at: office@ethicalhuman.org and 847.677.3334.

Send copies of your letters, and make contributions to the legal defense by contacting: sunsaratour@yahoo.com

To all in the Chicago area, join me this Sunday at the Best Church Of God: http://www.bestchurchofgod.org/.god/

And, because you really have been lied to about communism, join me in catching Raymond Lotta at U of Chicago on Wed, November 11th, 7 pm Kent Hall Room 107. “Everything You've Been Told About Communism Is Wrong! Capitalism Is a Failure. Revolution Is the Solution.”

Labels: anti-communism, censorship, ehsc, sunsara taylor

posted by sunsara taylor at 10:21 am

Italians Do What Obama Won't: Convict Torturers

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 17:11:58 -0500

In a breaking story that only CNN in US media appears to be carrying at this point, but numerous other foreign news services such as BBC are carrying: an Italian court has found twenty-two Americans guilty of kidnapping and torture of a cleric.

CBC News today, November 4, 2009, is running the AP wire service report, which reads in part:

“State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said …the Obama administration was ‘disappointed about the verdicts.’

“Twenty-two of the convicted Americans were immediately sentenced to five years in jail at the end of the nearly three-year trial. The other convicted American, former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, was given the stiffest sentence, eight years in prison.

“The Americans' lawyers, most of whom have had no contact with their clients, entered pleas of not guilty on their behalf and argued for their acquittals.

“The Americans were accused of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003, from a street in Milan, then transferring him by van to the Aviano Air Base in northern Italy, where he was put on a plane and taken to Ramstein Air Base in southern Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. He has since been released but has not been permitted to leave Egypt to attend the trial….

“The Americans' defence team has employed various arguments throughout the trial to justify their clients' actions: namely, that they were following orders, that they should be cleared because of diplomatic immunity and that extraordinary renditions were not illegal under the policies adopted by former U.S. president George W. Bush to combat terrorism.”

Is it too much to ask that Obama, who campaigned on a platform that he would end torture and that he would reverse the unconstitutional practices of Bush, should express relief that CIA officials and American diplomats guilty of kidnapping and torture have been found guilty for acts that Obama said he is against?

Apparently.

Instead, of course, of relief at torturers being held to account, Obama is “disappointed about the verdicts.”

Who is more disappointed here, those who believed that Obama would right grievous wrongs, or Obama, who has been arguing since taking office against holding Bush officials accountable for their monstrous and illegal acts?

Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was given the harshest sentence of eight years in prison, was quoted in the Il Giornale newspaper in June 2009 as saying: "I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors. It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair."

Does the CIA not train their personnel in what the Nuremberg Verdicts said, that following orders, the weak defense raised by Nazi war criminals, is no excuse?

As for the other two arguments raised by the Americans’ defense lawyers:

Does anyone here seriously think that diplomatic immunity should protect you from being prosecuted for crimes against humanity?

And as for the argument that extraordinary rendition was not illegal under Bush – again, that’s no argument. The fact that a government declared it their policy to rendition people in order to be tortured in places such as Egypt where torture is routine and well-known, doesn’t override the fact that kidnapping people for purposes of torture is still illegal and immoral. Moreover, Obama is undoubtedly “disappointed” in this verdict because it undercuts his public and continued use of rendition.