justice

Move Your Money.

The Open Textbook Movement

In case you were too busy building your library’s collection to notice, education institutions at every level are experiencing a textbook crisis. Stratospheric pricing models and questionable industry practices, such as frequent new editions, have made the cost of textbooks a rapidly increasing percentage of the overall cost of higher education. Students are engaged in a battle to lower textbook costs and are using every option from sharing books with classmates to online pirating to outright refusing to buy them.

via Not Textbooks. Think Curricular Resource Strategy, Part I | From the Bell Tower – 12/10/2009 – Library Journal.

I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three.

via For Obama, No Opportunity Too Big To Blow | Naomi Klein.

There were some real problems in the 1960s and 1970s, as there are now. Racism and oppression, economic insecurity and depression, for example. People wanted those problems solved. The state didn’t say “we’re going to solve this problem by giving income guarantees to everyone in low-income communities.” Instead, it said “we’re going to solve this problem by putting everyone in prison for part or all of their lives for doing things that we didn’t use to put people in prison for.” In the 1970s, the state started coming in an re-arranging social relations. Pretty quickly, it became normal that more and more people were taken away and punished. But people also started demanding those kinds of surveillance and control in their own neighborhoods. It’s kind of astonishing to imagine the huge shift that had taken place since the 1960s. There used to be a whole lot of suspicion about what cops and courts were up to – Jim Crow was dead in its grave, but not cold yet. By the early 1980s, community organizations were saying “we really want more police here.”

So during this time period society went from being suspicious of the police and the courts to placing all their trust in them. At the same time, the numbers of people in prison started going through the roof, and “crime” became a national concern. Before the 1970s, crime had been a local issue. “Crime” became a national obsession. Now, we’re at the point where it seems completely natural to have massive prisons and huge numbers of people in them. These ideas about “crime” and prisons that were very new in the 1970s have become common-sense. In only a few years, it has become very hard to imagine a society without mass-incarceration.

via Recording Carceral Landscapes.

Incarcerex : Prison Industrial Complex Video.

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected.

via Obama’s Big Sellout : Rolling Stone.

The issue must be grounded in moral principles. It is time to reclaim education as an act of solidarity, not one of cold blooded profit and vicious individualism. Education must encompass such values as appreciation for diversity, participation in power or decision-making and equity in the form of equal opportunities for workers and students. Proprietary colleges see diversity only as a marketing plan, participation in power limited to the decisions of the CEO’s who run these colleges and equity or equal opportunity, as simply not part and parcel of their business plan. In fact the opposite is true, the proprietary schools prey of the most impoverished.

If we allow the proprietary colleges and universities to predate our public institutions by siphoning of billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, then we’ve become the alchemy of fools. I have higher hopes or perhaps, let us say, greater expectations that this sublimated subsidized industry must and can be relegated to the trash heap of history, probably the greatest lesson these schools could teach us.

via Dissident Voice : Social Death, Public Banishment and Increased Militarization: Youth Living Dickensian Lives.