Moral policy = Good economics: Lifting up poor and working-class people—and our whole economy

Moral policy = Good economics: Lifting up poor and working-class people—and our whole economy: This article is a collaboration between the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival—a moral movement rooted in the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that is organizing around the needs and demands of the 140 million in 45 states—and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)—an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that uses economic research and analysis to understand and improve the economic conditions of workers and their families. In this article, we evaluate the public policies that shaped the preexisting conditions of the pandemic, policies that were by no means accidental or morally neutral, and lay out the policies that we need to counter and reverse the status quo, including the heightened suffering from the pandemic.

SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Corporate Inflation Scare- and news coverage- is d...

SACRAMENTO PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE: Corporate Inflation Scare- and news coverage- is d...: The New Inflation Scare Is the Dumbest Thing Since Voodoo Economics Elites are sounding the alarm over threats of inflation in order to bloc...

How Supply Chains Work- and Don't

 From The New York Review of Books

Bringing the Supply Chain Back Home
Is Biden ready to insist that national economic planning is not just ideologically permissible but urgently necessary?

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/11/18/bringing-the-supply-chain-back-home/?utm_source=nybooks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share

Inflation is not the biggest economic news

Inflation Is Not The Biggest Thing Happening In The Economy Right Now Family poverty has substantially declined thanks to the child tax credit. By Arthur Delaney

 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/inflation-child-poverty-tax- 

The Undignified Demise of Centrism

The Undignified Demise of Centrism: Centrist Democrats may force changes to the Build Back Better Act, but their rationale as a political orientation has disintegrated.

Making matters worse is the transparent corruption and pay-for-play that motivates the party’s moderates in this wandering journey. The individual provisions inside the BBB are extremely popular with the American public, but not the corporate world and its lobbying apparatus, and its opponents make no attempt to even put forward a plausible explanation for why they’re opposed to popular things beyond the fact that they’re paid to be.

Why the Strikes, and What Might They Lead To?

Why the Strikes, and What Might They Lead To?: The Great Recession is long gone, but some employers insist that their employees work under recession-era constraints.

What happened on the Infrastructure Bill ?

 The view of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez.  The Bernie Sanders side of the Democrats.

Duane, we had an absolutely wild infrastructure vote Friday night.

Here’s what happened:

For months, Congress has been negotiating two bills that together make up the President’s agenda: the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. Together, they would make major investments in our country’s physical and human infrastructure — the former to our roads and bridges, and the latter to childcare, eldercare, climate action, paid family leave, lowering prescription drug prices, and much more.

The agreement from the start was that the bills would pass together.Progressives felt strongly that the President’s entire agenda needed to pass in order for Democrats to deliver on long-held promises, most notably acting on climate change. Working with movement leaders, we made clear months ago, ‘no climate, no deal.’ That means if conservative Democrats wouldn't step up to support the Build Back Better Act, they couldn't count on our vote for their infrastructure bill.

But on Friday, a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill was scheduled withoutthe Build Back Better Act. So in order to hold the line and stand our ground for the climate, Alexandria and the Squad voted ‘no’ on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, just as they said they would from day one.¹

Add your name here to thank Alexandria for holding her ground and together we can finish the job and pass the Build Back Better Act.

Add your name

The pressure around this vote was unreal. Lobbyists and corporations have been fighting with everything they have for months to decouple the Build Back Better Act from the infrastructure bill. Alexandria even got the CEO at Exxon to admit in a public hearing he’s been in direct conversations with legislators around the climate provisions in this bill. But Alexandria doesn’t take a dime from lobbyists or CEOs. She answers to you. That’s why she stood up for us, and that’s why we need your help now.

As you likely heard, the infrastructure bill still passed into law. House leadership got several Republicans to support the bill and countered the Squad’s ‘no’ votes. So, what now?

The President says he’s still committed to passing the Build Back Better Act. And it’s absolutely critical that he and everyone else who made that promise keeps their word.

Now is the critical moment to ramp up pressure for the Build Back Better Act. We need you to stand with Alexandria and commit to helping us get Build Back Better over the line.

The Build Back Better Act contains the majority of the president's agenda — including not just climate action but also paid leave, expanded Medicare, universal pre-k and lower costs for insulin and other prescription drugs. We must keep going and ensure these promises are delivered.

In solidarity,

Team AOC

What Is Critical Theory ?

 Critical Theory. Not Critical Race Theory.

From:  Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.  

Duane Campbell.  4^th. edition. 2010..

Critical Theory

 

Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy

Beginning in the 1970s, a new approach to schooling for student empowerment developed in the United States. This alternative intellectual tradition, known as critical theory and critical pedagogy,  had four major historical contributors in the U.S.: the work and influence of Paulo Freire; the work and influence of scholars who followed the lead of Althusser and Gramsci  (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985); feminist scholars who were searching for alternative understandings of gender relationships; and the political movements of empowerment, from the Mississippi Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement to current struggles to rebuild the schools for democratic citizenship.

Critical Theory 

Educators using critical theory assume that men and women have a moral imperative toward developing their own humanity  and freedom. This assumption differs from the “scientific” positivist or empiricist scholarly tradition, where researchers assume the need for neutrality and objectivity of investigation (see Chapter 6). Critical theorists further assume that the current problems of any society are subject to investigation and change. They assume that individuals and groups can and should work together to build a more democratic education system and a more democratic society.

Education writers urging the use of critical theory in the United States include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Kathleen Weiler, Carlos Torres, Joan Wink, Antonia Darder, Stanley Aronowitz, and several of the co-authors of this book.[1]

The following concepts are central to critical theory and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience:

•     Consciousness: Awareness of yourself and your environment. Consciousness includes self-awareness. For example, “multicultural consciousness” refers to a recognition of the ethnic, racial, and social divisions in our society.

•     Culture: The collective knowledge of a group of people (described extensively in Chapter 2). Please note that European American critical theorists have tended to rely on European authors for descriptions of culture—authors who tend to emphasize class differences and to pay less attention to differences among cultures and ethnic groups.

•     Domination: The act of controlling an individual or group of people.

•     Empowerment: Education processes that lead to political courage and political efficacy. Empowerment strategies teach students to analyze and to act on their analyses. Empowerment strategies also help students gain social, political, and economic power, including the power to make their own decisions.

•     Ethics: Normative preferences and recognition that decisions are often  based on values rather than exclusively on objective research.

•     Hegemony: The overwhelming domination of ideologies or economic systems by a single group or source of power. Often ideological hegemony leaves learners unaware of alternative viewpoints. For example, most schools and teachers have an unexamined commitment to competitive grading.

•     Hidden curriculum: The variety of values and ideas taught informally in schools. These values,  attitudes and assumptions permeate school but rarely reveal themselves in lesson plans or tests. For example, U.S. schools commonly teach individualism, competitiveness, and a European American perspective on our nation’s history.

•     Ideologies: A series of interrelated ideas, such as racism or cultural pluralism. A dominant ideology is often taught in schools as if it were the only truth. For example, we are taught that the United States has a democratic government. Our system is then presented as the definition of democracy: two competing parties, regular elections, a free press, and limited government intervention in the economy. There are other models of democracy, but our particular system is taught as an ideology. In similar fashion, we are taught an ideology that our schools are politically neutral, even though they are clearly committed to the maintenance of the present economic/power system.

•     Ideological domination: Controlling the ideas presented to students by, for example,  by writing standards and  selecting the content of  tests and textbooks.

•     Social class: A group identified by its economic position in the society—that is, working class, poor, the wealthy,  owners of corporations. There are several contending descriptions of classes in the United States (see Chapter 4).

•     Social construction of knowledge: The observation that most knowledge is created by persons. What we regard as knowledge was created for a purpose. The concept of the social construction of knowledge treats knowledge as purposeful and as serving particular interests rather than as neutral and merely discovered. For example, IQ tests were generated for a particular purpose: to predict school success. They do not define intelligence; instead, they measure a specific kind of mental aptitude in relation to a specific purpose. As an alternative, Gardner (1983) proposes that the concept of multiple intelligences provides a different, more useful description of thinking processes.

Critical Pedagogy

At the turn of the last century, John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that a central purpose of schooling was to prepare students to build a democratic society. He thought that critical analysis and learning by doing were essential for the preparation of citizens in a democracy (Dewey, 1916/1966). Influenced by the massive European immigration from 1890  to 1920, Dewey was not an advocate of multicultural education as we presently know it. Like Jefferson before him, Dewey favored having schools lead the nation in developing a new, idealized, democratic American. Today, in a parallel period of massive immigration, Dewey’s works provide  important insights for the position that schools can serve in the cause of creating a democratic society.

In the 1970s, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire contributed to a  new interest  in and extension of Dewey’s ideas in the field of  education advancing a pluralistic democracy. Freire’s work revolves around a socially responsible humanism. Like Dewey, he believed that education has a central role in building a democratic society. But Freire’s writings offered a new and fresh view of education’s role as a participant in the political struggle to liberate oppressed people. He argued that ending oppression and the “culture of silence” in Brazil  was essential to the process of building a democratic, participatory community.

Freire first gained attention for the methodology he and his colleagues developed to teach literacy to the impoverished people of the Recife area of northeast Brazil. His first major book, A Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972), described a revolutionary educational and social change process for the poor in Latin America. Freire believed that education workers could help empower adults by engaging in dialogue with them instead of falling into traditional teacher–student roles. The Brazilian military  government’s official response to his work was to arrest him in 1964 to stop the mobilization of the poor. After his imprisonment and eventual deportation, he worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was soon being read and discussed throughout Latin America and among small circles of intellectuals in the United States and Europe (Freire, n.d., 1985; McFadden, 1975; McLaren, 2000). In it Freire describes the oppressive and colonizing functions served by traditional teacher-dominated schooling. Freire’s ideas have important ramifications for understanding the education of oppressed cultural and class groups in U.S. schools.

Prior to Freire’s work, most published education research and university work in social science education in the United States had suggested only technical improvements to the existing school curriculum. The “scientific study” of schools, common even today, used positivist, reductionist research methods (see Chapter 6). This research generally strengthened the school’s role in the domination of oppressed communities. Freire’s writings suggested new analytical concepts to describe the experiences of students. His work offered new hope and insight for teachers working with alienated and oppressed students in our own society. Teachers and activists searched his works and found alternative strategies for work with immigrant and working-class students. Freire’s work suggested solutions to the structural failure of poor children in U.S. schools, whereas the narrow research paradigms of positivism hid  the critical questions of race and class domination and provided few real alternatives.

Freire openly acknowledged that his views included a political pedagogy (Friere, 1998). He revealed the political and class dimensions underlying any education system. Education and schools could reinforce the domination of the existing structure, or they could introduce students to citizenship and freedom. Education could help young people to lead free and self-empowering lives. Following Freire’s lead, education teams in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Nicaragua taught the poor to read by helping community members analyze their life situations. Poor peasants engaged in community organizing to effect social change. Freire used the term praxis to describe the process of critical analysis leading to action. The experience of praxis empowers people to participate in democratic struggles. It gives students and teachers hope.   Multicultural education applies the principles of cultural action and praxis to U.S. public schools, particularly schools serving students of oppressed classes and cultures.

Conservative scholars accuse advocates of multicultural education of politicizing the curriculum. This charge has intimidated some multicultural education advocates and placed them on the defensive. Yet clearly the writings of John Dewey were profoundly political. Critics attack the political dimension of both Freire’s work and multicultural educational theory while refusing to acknowledge that Dewey’s major works provide the intellectual foundations of social justice teaching. Dewey argued that the schools should promote immigrant assimilation and build a democratic society. These are political goals. Freire’s work, like Dewey’s, recognizes the essentially political nature of education.

Both the present Eurocentric curriculum and its multicultural alternatives are highly political. The current standards-based, test-driven curriculum is a political project imposed by legislatures and the President. Realistically, a teacher’s choice is not between being political or neutral. Claiming political neutrality for schools actually supports the continuation of the current tracked, starkly unequal system—a profoundly political position.

The teaching strategies and attitudes described by Freire and adapted for social justice  multicultural education in the United States begin by respecting the prior cultural knowledge that all students bring to the classroom. Freire, like Dewey, argued for rooting the education experience in students’ real experiences. Freire believed that speech, language, and literacy can be understood only in a social context and that students learn language and literacy best in the context of their social experience. He worked with a number of adult literacy campaigns that have applied this principle and that have had enormous impact in societies seeking transition to democracy. Cultural action in literacy contributed to social change in Brazil, Chile, Guinea-Bissau, and Nicaragua (Freire, 1997). In his writings, Freire also applauded successful efforts in the United States—notably the  Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

   Both ethnographic research and Freire’s work in Latin America considered culture as a field of struggle, not as a fixed or static object.    In this view, developing an understanding of their culture helps students to respect themselves, to learn from the past, and to participate in the active creation of a democratic future.  The literacy programs designed by Freire and his colleagues used an ethnographic perspective to assist peasants in learning about their culture as a means of empowering them (Freire & Macedo, 1987). While many teachers in bilingual and multicultural sites were drawn to the work of Paul Friere and his collaborators  for ideas by their emphasis on culture and the power of the struggle for social justice,  other   teachers and authors, primarily African American ,  were engaged in developing a parallel U.S.  approach  known as  Culturally Relevant Pedagogy as described in Chapter 2.   

Critical Race Theory 

 Following developments in legal studies and the work of Clarence Bell,  activists, scholars, and teachers  in the 1990’s  focused   again on  examining race and racism as it played out in the U.S. and in our schools – a movement known as Critical Race Theory.      Advocates of  critical  race theory argued that race theory  complemented critical theory in  the struggle for social justice since   race and racism had not been sufficiently  recognized and  analyzed in developing most  bilingual and multicultural programs. 

Empowerment as a Goal

When students recognize their own cultural context, they can learn to think critically about it and make meaningful decisions about their life opportunities. Critical pedagogy, or problem-posing education, seeks to help students understand the world they live in and to critically analyze their real-life situations. Critical analysis, practical skills, value clarity, and self-confidence lead to empowerment. Participation in community development helps students develop the political courage to work toward the resolution of their real problems. Community action teams working with preliterate peasants in Latin America helped them to learn to read and perhaps to create a labor union or farmer cooperative. For students from oppressed or marginalized groups in the United States, the goals might be gaining admission to college, receiving a good-quality high school preparation for work, or counteracting crime in their communities.

The strong democratic social justice  perspective in  multicultural education, including critical race theory,  has adopted the goal of empowerment as central to education reform. By urging that schools help students build a more democratic society, multicultural education moves away from positivism’s stress on being an objective observer of events. Education projects designed for empowerment help students to take a stand. They provide opportunities for students to intervene in their own families and communities—to analyze situations, decide, act, and then to analyze their actions anew. Empowerment is taught to overcome disempowerment.

Teachers can teach about social justice at all levels, including the primary grades. Even the youngest children are interested in  the value of fairness .  The question is one of emphasis.  There is more reason to stress a multicultural social justice approach in high schools where the students are adolescents and approaching maturity. 

 High school students are  ready and interested in  studying their own realities and how to operate within the limits of our political/economic system. It is more urgent in high school that the students learn to take control of their own lives  and to overcome low achievement and tracking. The economic consequences, including incarceration, are more severe if students get left behind during their high school years.

Multicultural education that is social justice oriented deals directly and forcefully with social and structural inequities in our society, including racism, sexism, and class prejudice. It prepares students from oppressed groups to succeed in spite of existing inequalities. This approach argues for a bold commitment to democracy in schooling based on a belief in the learning potential of students from all races and classes, and both genders

 

Figure 7.2  describes this  approach of multicultural education that is social justice oriented.

 

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insert 7.2 about here

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SELECTING THEMES FOR EMPOWERMENT AND HOPE

Prior to 1998, teachers made the most fundamental decisions on what themes and concepts to teach and to emphasize   in their classrooms. Since then, the dominant standards movement assumes that teachers should follow a curriculum controlled and provided by the state or the district (see Chapter 12). In the area of reading and phonics  this often includes scripted lessons that tell the teacher precisely what to say (derived from remedial perspectives and the Teaching the Exceptional and Culturally Different viewpoint.) In this manner, the standards committee, or the district  or often the textbook publishers have decided precisely what the teachers should teach.

Both critical theory and a strong sense of multicultural education suggest an alternative approach: that teaching and learning should begin

 

What Sullivan is describing is Post Modernism.  There are many left critiques of this.

 

My favorite is  The Post Modern Pooh, by Frederick Crews.

 

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[1] See in particular Aronowitz and Giroux (1985), Freire (1997), Freire and Macedo (1987), Giroux (1988), McLaren (1989), and Weiler (1988).

NYT Climate Change Graphic

 Climate change graphic

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/25/climate/world-climate-pledges-cop26.html?

 

What is the Green New Deal ?

 Green New Deal

 

https://www.labor4sustainability.org/strike/the-green-new-deal-from-below/

 

The Green New Deal is a visionary program to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice.

The Green New Deal first emerged as a proposal for national legislation, and the struggle to embody it in national legislation is ongoing. But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other non-federal institutions designed to contribute to the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. We will call these the Green New Deal from Below (GNDfB).

The purpose of this commentary is to provide an overview of Green New Deal from Below initiatives in many different arenas and locations. It provides an introduction to a series of commentaries that will delve more deeply into each aspect of the GNDfB. The purpose of the series is to reveal the rich diversity of GNDfB programs already underway and in development. The projects of Green New Dealers recounted here should provide inspiration for thousands more that can create the foundation for national mobilization–and reconstruction.

The original 2018 Green New Deal resolution submitted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for a national 10-year mobilization to achieve 100% of national power generation from renewable sources; a national “smart grid”; energy efficiency upgrades for every residential and industrial building; decarbonizing manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and other infrastructure; and helping other countries achieve carbon neutral economies and a global Green New Deal. It proposed a job guarantee to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one; mitigation of income and wealth inequality; basic income programs; and universal health care. It advocated innovative financial structures including cooperative and public ownership and public banks. Since that time a wide-ranging discussion has extended and fleshed out the vision of the Green New Deal to include an even wider range of proposals to address climate, jobs, and justice.

See details.