Columbine questions we still haven't answered: Isn't violence a predictable byproduct of our winner-take-all economy?

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Salon.com
By David Sirota

As Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's posthumous infamy turns 10 on April 20, I wish I were surprised that Columbine-like shootings are still happening, or even that our national discussion about violence hasn't yet matured past gun control and video games.
I wish I were surprised, but sadly, I'd be surprised if it were any different because we still refuse to ask the most uncomfortable questions.
Columbine was the "Pulp Fiction" of violence: not the first of its genre, but the model to which all contemporaries are compared. And lately, Columbine derivatives have been coming at a faster clip.
After each tragedy, it's the same thing. Liberals want us to wonder why gun laws let anyone access deadly weapons. Conservatives insist we question why video games supposedly turn down-to-earth kids into murderers.
These queries satiate two desires. In a country that ascribes hubristic "exceptionalism" to itself and berates self-analysis as "hating America," we seek absolution via scapegoat, and so we upbraid boogeymen like firearms and Xboxes. Similarly, in a democracy increasingly conducting its politics through red-blue filters and 140-character Twitter updates, we crave Occam's razors -- and none are sharper than oversimplified arguments about gun control and video games.
But what about the questions and answers that aren't so simple?
For example, isn't violence a predictable byproduct of our economy? When torture victims are waterboarded, they freak out. When a winner-take-all economy tortures society, should we be shocked that a few lunatics go over the edge?
For three decades, we converted our economy into one that enriches the rich and stresses out everyone else. Paychecks dwindled, debts accumulated, healthcare bills spiked. We now spend more hours working or seeking work, and fewer hours on parenting, family time and rest -- all while schools and mental-health services deteriorate.
Considering this, shouldn't we expect the recent Associated Press story telling us "the American home is becoming more violent" because of the recession? Shouldn't we expect the new Department of Homeland Security report saying that "the economic downturn" is "invigorating rightwing extremist activity, specifically the white supremacist and militia movements"? And, ultimately, shouldn't we expect the deep alienation that may lead the occasional troubled kid to turn video-game fantasies into real-world terror?
If these questions don't make you uneasy, then how about this one: Are those video games fantasies, or are they representations of real violence that we willfully organize our economy around?
Today, one in every three dollars the government spends goes to defense and security. The killing machine and adventurism that money manufactures has delivered 1 million Iraqi casualties, thousands of American casualties and an implicit promise of future wars -- indeed, of permanent war.
Perpetuating this expenditure, bloodshed and posture in a nation of dwindling resources, humanitarian self-images and anti-interventionist impulses requires a culture constantly selling violence as a necessity. It's not just video games -- it's the nightly news echoing Pentagon propaganda and "hawkish" politicians equating militarism with patriotism and "embedded" journalism cheering on wars and every other suit-and-tie-clad industry constantly forwarding the assumption that killing is a legitimate form of national ambition and self-expression. Is it any wonder that a few crazies apply that ethos to their individual lives, and begin seeing violence as a reasonable means to express their own emotions?
Sure, the assault weapons ban's expiration is an abomination. Absolutely, some video games are appalling. But we could ban all guns and video games and there would still be mass murders because neither the availability of firearms nor of Grand Theft Auto creates the original desire for violence.
Until we face that complex reality -- or at least ask different questions -- we'll continue being terrorized by Columbine killers.
© 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.

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Planned Parenthood Rips into McCain for Sex-Ed Smear Campaign

AlterNet

Planned Parenthood defends Barack Obama's record on sex education after a nasty John McCain ad suggesting the Democrat supports teaching kindergartners about sex. In an ad, they say that Obama was helping children protect themselves from sex offenders, while McCain seemingly doesn't care.

"Every eight minutes a child is sexually abused," the narrator says. "That's why Barack Obama supported legislation to teach children how to protect themselves. Now John McCain is twisting the facts and attacking Senator Obama. Doesn't McCain want our children to protect ourselves from sex offenders? Or after 26 years in Washington, is he just another politician who will say anything to get elected?"

And if you can, make a donation to Planned Parenthood Action Fund so we can continue our efforts to make sure as many people as possible know the truth about the candidates in this presidential election, to elect pro-choice leaders, and to guarantee pro-choice policies and laws for years to come.

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Neil Bush Cashes In on No Child Left Behind

AlterNet: Blogs

Recently, a three-month investigation by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) revealed that schools are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, including No Child Left Behind funds, on Neil Bush's COWs. "It is astonishing that taxpayer dollars are being spent on unproven educational products to the financial benefit of the president's brother," CREW's executive director, Melanie Sloan, said in a press release.


[..] the Education Department's Inspector General "should investigate whether children's educations are being sacrificed so that Neil Bush can rake in federal funds," considering that Neil Bush was also on the receiving end a couple years back of cash donated by his mother, Barbara, to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund co-operated by his father, George H.W.--cash specifically earmarked for purchase of his COWs for storm ravaged schools--I'm gonna go ahead and say the answer is yes.

No Child Left Behind Law A Disaster for Inner City Schools

UNDERVIEWS

The poisonous essence of [the federal education law No Child Left Behind] lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic "teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they, themselves, attended.


The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do not pump their students' scores by using proto-military methods of instruction -- scripted texts and hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep factories.


The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of thousands of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban districts struggle to attract into these schools. There are more remarkable young teachers like this coming into inner-city education than at any time I've seen in more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep them. But 50% of the glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from the nation's most respected colleges and universities are throwing up their hands and giving up their jobs within three years.


When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it's the feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in school.


"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and anthropology in college while also having been immersed in education courses -- "in order to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics, all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are getting in the middle-class white systems." At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more segregated than at any time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment that may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom more than five or six white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of division between children of minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In good suburban classrooms, children master the essential skills not from terror but from exhilaration, inspired in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in itself. They're also given critical capacities that they will need if they're to succeed in college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power to interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give pre-scripted answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.


In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June that prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of school integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically transformed -- will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly divided sectors of American society.

Virginia Tech: Copy Cat Violence or Social Statement

AlterNet dares to make unpopular observatations and ask uncomfortable questions. Thats why I read them every day. You just get cheerleading from the mainstream news sources, no real leadership.
Here the author asks the tough questions about the Virginia Tech killings. While I don't agree with articles conclusions or many of the commenters, I do think these questions need to be asked.
For a mental health professionals analysis of news reports and a suggestion what we can do, read here.

In his book "No Easy Answer," Brooks Brown, a former Columbine student and childhood friend of one of the Columbine killers, explained how the rage rebellion context reached his school:

The end of my junior year (1998), school shootings were making their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Miss. Two months later, in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. ...


Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. ...


When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how "it was going to happen at Columbine next." They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.

The schoolyard shootings in Pearl, Paducah and Jonesboro in 1997 might have seemed little more than isolated incidents if they didn't already have a context in the office massacres that had been leaving behind blood-spattered workplace corpses for over a decade. The three schoolyard shootings happened one after another, creating a snowball effect that helped propel the schoolyard massacre coastward and into cities, to Pennsylvania and Oregon, and later, of course, to Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.


In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life -- smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.


And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"

Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."


The Columbine killers openly declared that their planned massacre was intended to ignite a nationwide uprising. "We're going to kick-start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed!" Eric Harris said in a video diary he made before the killings. "I want to leave a lasting impression on the world," he added in another entry. And they certainly did leave an impression, including on Cho Seung-Hui, who referred to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" in his "multimedia manifesto."


If the immediate goal of an armed uprising is to spark wider sympathy and a wider rebellion, then many of these rage uprisings have succeeded.


One of the most troubling and censored aspects of schoolyard massacres is how popular they are with a huge number of kids -- witness the threats issued the day after Cho Seung-Hui's Virginia Tech massacre to the campuses of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, St. Edward's in Austin, Texas, and two high schools in southeastern Louisiana.


The popularity of the Columbine massacre helped spawn several more schoolyard shootings and untold numbers of school-massacre plots, many of which were uncovered, and many of which were the inventions of paranoid adults.

"They said specifically it would be bigger than Columbine," New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly said." -- Associated Press, "New Bedford police say they foiled Columbine-like plot," Nov. 24, 2001

Across America, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris became anti-heroes in the aftermath of their school shooting. In a Rocky Mountain News article titled "Surfers Worship Heroes of Hate," dated Feb. 6, 2000, the journalist details the mass popularity of the Columbine killers: "They made hate-filled videotapes about the day the deed they were planning would make them cult heroes. Now, they appear to have gotten what they wanted -- at least online." The article goes on to quote some of the message boards devoted to Klebold and Harris:

In a Yahoo! club devoted to the killers, a 15-year-old Elizabeth, N.J., girl writes: "They are really my heroes. They are in a way gods ... since I don't believe in 'GOD' or any of that other crap that goes along with it. They are the closest thing we can get to it, and I think they are good at it. They stood up for what they believe in, and they actually did something about it."

A 14-year-old Toronto girl is also cited as belonging to 20 (!) online fan clubs devoted to Klebold and Harris. The point of the article is that the Internet shows just how sick our kids are. It does not consider the possibility that maybe the kids aren't simply evil but have valid[?] reasons for making Klebold and Harris into heroes. Perhaps they are considered heroes for valid[?] reasons, and the Net allows us easier access into the unofficial truth.


The reason Klebold and Harris's hero status is expressed online is obvious: It's the one place where you can exchange ideas with a reasonable hope of maintaining anonymity.


Initially it was thought that Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were drug-addled dropouts, Nazi-enthused homosexuals, children of broken homes, Goth-geeks, Trench Coat Mafiosi, Internet/video game freaks or Marilyn Manson goons. But the truth was far more commonplace, and that's what was so disturbing about their massacre. Both came from two-parent homes, both loved their parents and both were highly intelligent but erratic students. They weren't Nazis or drug addicts. They weren't Goths, Trench Coat Mafiosi, or Marilyn Manson fiends; they weren't even gay, as some had theorized.


Some schoolyard shooters were honors students, some were bad students; some were geeks, some were fairly popular; and some were anti-social, others seemed to be easy-going and "not at all the type." Some have been girls, a fact strangely overlooked by most. Like their rage counterparts in the adult world, school shooters could be literally any kid except perhaps those who belonged to the popular crowd, the school's version of the executive/shareholding class. That is to say, about 90 percent of each suburban school's student body is a possible suspect.


And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.


It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.


The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to "pry your eyes open."

I'm hard pressed to buy that there are any "valid" reasons for the Columbine killers to be considered heros. But indeed it is happening among a few on the web. The concept of a dispossessed underclass seems to resonate in some circles. We should be concerned and willing to do something about the social process of ostracizing and bullying in our schools and work places.

Anti-Science Movement Turns on "Inconvenient Truth"

The anti-science sentiment in the community continues now with Gore's thoroughly documented presentation on global warming. Apparently some people are so caught up in right wing propaganda that global warming is a liberal conspiracy that they will not be confused with the facts. Worse yet, some see global warming as representing the coming rapture and see no reason to intervene!
washingtonpost.com

Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary. "Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.


Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.


"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.


His angry e-mail (along with complaints from a few other parents) stopped the film from being shown to Hardiman's daughter. The teacher in that science class, Kay Walls, says that after Hardiman's e-mail she was told by her principal that she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present "controversial" materials in class.

From digital divide to social empowerment

V Ramaswamy
Looking at the socio-economic picture of India, it is clear that there is a large segment of our people who are entirely outside of the IT revolution. The existing social structure ensures that such people live out their lives without any access to the technology, its instruments, its education. Existing socio-economic disparities are magnified, as the new technology is embraced by those with access to good education, exposure and social confidence, skills, capital etc. This has given rise to the term "digital divide". The term suggests that the world shall henceforth comprise of those who are part of the digital revolution, and those who are left out of this. The former would have a stake in the emerging future, while the latter are consigned to a sub-human status.
One section is entering the post-digital age, in terms of cognitive development, while the other languishes in the pre-literate era. Increasingly, the common space binding together our people in a shared world - is vanishing.
The response
There could be two kinds of response to this situation.
The first, a normative one, an idealistic view, calling for social justice, equity, opportunity etc. Actually, this is not simply idealistic, but also quite realistic. No one thinks very much about the pernicious effect of socio-economic disparities, and the social instability, violence etc that results. Since we do ultimately coexist in the same geographical space, in the long run effects do catch up with causes.
The second approach, is a more practical one. This looks at the distorted nature of the IT sector in India and advocates a drastic reorganisation. In a manner that breaks the nexus between social structure and technology access. Where technology access becomes the means to change the social structure.
The application of the technology and its impact is determined by the existing social structure. However, the same technology may also be subversive of the existing structure.
Mass computing
Notwithstanding the growth of PC use in India over the last decade and more, this is still something touching a miniscule part of the country's people or economic activities. While improvements have definitely taken place, in terms of electrification and spread of the telephone and television network, there still remains the immense metro / urban - rural gap in infrastructure.
Even within this dichotomy, there is a further dichotomy. No one looks at computing in the context of the whole spectrum of economic activities - especially on the humbler side. Even as computer-use grows, computing as such remains a casualty. But the scope for mass computing, as applied to diverse professions and activities, including many humble ones, remains an untapped field. This calls for greater communication with users and customer-specific applications and solutions. Most significantly, it calls for marketing strategies that break the socially defined barriers of communication. Even within metro cities, PC vendors do not think of selling to modest retail outlets, small businesses, run by unsophisticated people who do not belong to the English-medium domain. But in its own interest, the IT sector has to break out of this syndrome.
This is something that could well be a means to enhance livelihood, employment, enterprise, productivity, efficiency and profit. Most fundamentally, it could bring dignity to the down-trodden.
Looking at the technology itself, and its applications, it is clear that this could actually be a powerful means for positive change, in the direction of empowerment of the poor. But for this potential to be realised, and over a mass scale, a number of major steps have to be taken. These would go against the grain of the predominant orientation of the computers-related industry.
This then poses a tremendous challenge, to the whole field of information technology, as well as to social thinkers and planners. The longer this challenge is ignored, the deeper and more immutable the digital divide.
There have been a number of visionary experiments and small-scale efforts along these lines, internationally as well as in India. These have only affirmed the revolutionary empowering potential of the computer. But there is now a need to move from the stage of small experiments to actions at a mass scale. Programmes of socio-economic empowerment have also to be integrated with "digital empowerment ".
Recycling hardware
Keeping the focus on real computing applications (rather than machines to sell), in a real user context, will necessarily mean that a whole new operation has to be established. To make available affordable computing hardware and software, which will significantly empower a range of economic actors who are presently outside the purview of IT.
Where do the old machines go? In a poor country like India, which is capital scarce, can we afford to waste the valuable social capital that usable computing hardware represents? Recycling hardware, within an approach of developing and presenting use-focused computing applications, is a key challenge.
A match has to be made - between potential users of computing, and computing equipment. This calls for people, information and capital.
Computer education
Once again, if one keeps the entire society in view, then there is not much to be said about computer education in India. Illiteracy, school drop-outs, school and university graduates who are unemployable for all practical purposes - all this casts a very dark shadow. What is the way out?
How long does it take to bridge the chasm between illiteracy, or limited education, and computer-literacy? What are the cognitive foundations of computer application? Most significantly, how can one somehow bring about access and exposure to computers for the deprived?
Even today, the commonest "social welfare" intervention in urban slum areas is to impart tailoring skills to poor women and provide them with sewing machines. But could one imagine imparting basic computer education to some of these very women, and distributing recycled PCs, with which a range of home or workplace-based data-entry, processing, storage, communications, service and web-related operations can be undertaken?
Can one conceive of huge databases, all valuable to specific users, that are maintained by neo-literates? Consider the employment generated in hardware assembly and maintenance, customer relations, software adaptation.
Can one envision computer-based networks spreading through the interstices of the city, binding together deprived people in a movement for empowerment?
All bringing income, dignity, and parity with the emerging world?
Thus a second major area of challenge is mass computer education. In turn, this presumes the recycling operation.
Institutional infrastructure
When one talks about any kind of change, one should think about the ownership of this process. Who is responsible? This leads us to the third, and perhaps most crucial link of the chain: grassroot-level institutions.
We need to build institutions and institutional capabilities, to work with IT, among the deprived sections. In urban slum neighbourhoods for instance. Not self-serving institutions, but institutions which act as resource units and catalysts for empowerment of large numbers of humble citizens. Institutions which will work, patiently, and with vision, amidst difficult conditions, and nurture a generation of post-digital divide learners and workers.
Can the socially enlightened application of technology be used as a powerful means for the substantive empowerment of the weaker sections, and thus bring to life and vitality the whole social fabric of the nation?

A Crisis of Ignorance in America

Social studies becoming an unintended casualty

The Cold War refers to a spot at the North Pole. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1892. John F. Kennedy and his son, John Jr., were one of the two father/son pairs to serve as president. That's American history -- according to some local high school students. How about the "date which will live in infamy"? Well, not exactly. Two of 10 high school students interviewed could name the date of the attack on Pearl Harbor.


Students' ignorance of their country's history comes as little surprise to many educators. What disturbs them more is that schools are doing little to change that, they said. "There is a crisis out there," said Jack Bovee, past president of the Florida Association of Social Studies Supervisors. "We've lost the second generation of young Americans who don't know a lot of our country, our economic system ... and nobody cares."

[...]
"To have a well-rounded education and to have students understand what it is to be a citizen, they need to know their place in history. They need to know their rights," said Francis Holleran, Charlotte County schools' curriculum specialist for social sciences.

The teachers interviewed are expressing another example of America's greatest resource, our children, are being largely ignored. And another unanticipated consequence of "No Child Left Behind" will only make this problem worse. Social Studies is not part of the test.
But there is worse trouble for America's future. We are falling behind the world in engineering and education. The Bush Administration is too busy lining the pockets of his "base" and they are shipping all of their investments and jobs overseas where labor and materials are cheap. All of this is good for America, says the Bush Campaign.
The Bush Administration is squandering the future of America for greed. We need to return to American Values in 2008 and elect a Democrat to ensure our children's future.

Another Attack on Freedom of Speech

Censorship by thick pocketted students may curtail academic freedom in Florida. A student who can afford to sue a professor, maybe able to do so under a law proposed in the Florida House. College curricula may well be controlled by students with cash who choose to intimidate the university they attend.
And Republicans are so concerned about tort reform. Let's keep victims of negligence from suing big companies for harming them, but instead intimidate professors and tie up the courts settling curricula in our schools. That makes sense, doesn't it? This isn't rule of law, this is rule of the monied.
THE LAW COULD LET STUDENTS SUE FOR UNTOLERATED BELIEFS

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities. The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee. The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House. While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”


The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views. According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities. Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.


“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue. Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened. Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.


“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs — even if they win — from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.” The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts.

America's Decline

I found an article that covers many of my concerns about the
economic policies of the Bush Administration and adds a lot of details. The
article, "Off Track" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, describes the process by which the has fallen behind the curve in economic development. There is real concern among business leaders (400 blue-chip business executives including the CEOs of IBM, Pepsi, and General Motors, among others, and university presidents) that the American economy has reached an “inflection point,” a “unique and delicate historic juncture” at which America, “for the first time in our history…is confronting the prospect of a reverse brain drain.” The only way we can turn back the trends is “if we continue to create new, cutting-edge products and services to sell to those countries.”

The world has produced significant competition from other developed countries such as Europe, Japan and Korea, as well as incredible broom in China and India. Europe, Japan and Korea have caught us on innovation. Japan is on the verge of producing a CPU smaller and faster and cheaper than anything Intel has on the drawing boards using nano-technology, something the US is just exploring. China is already opening universities at a breathtaking clip, while Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Verizon have all opened research labs there —the kind that anchored the development of Silicon Valley. “It's become inevitable,” says Ross Armbrecht, president of the Industrial Research Institute, which is the think tank for the research arms of America's corporations, “that more and more of the most far-reaching innovations will be going overseas, to India and China,in the near future.”


Economics is a negotiation in uncertainties, and so nobody's really sure what all of these changes will mean for the well-being of the American middle class. But when you survey economists, policymakers, and business leaders about America's long-term future, it's hard to find many rank optimists; there are the Panicked, and then there are the Merely Tense. Richard Lester, the head of MIT's Center for Innovation, told me he belongs in the latter camp: “Things look somewhat bleak in the long-term, but if you look around Boston,
at the incredible concentration of talent and opportunity here, we've still got a head start, and if we're smart we can probably build on it.” Among the Panicked are economists such as MIT Nobelist Paul Samuelson, who has recently argued that the rapid spread of innovative capacity to other countries with lower labor costs
makes him doubt the whole doctrine of “comparative advantage,” on which much of modern economics rests.


While the president's talk focused almost exclusively on the need to free up capital for investment, these CEOs barely mentioned that as a problem. Instead, they stressed various below-the-radar government actions that they felt were undermining America's competitive edge: security arrangements that have crimped the supply of educated immigrants; recent cuts in science funding (the president's 2005 budget sliced money for research in 21 of 24 areas); and the reassigning of what research funding remains to applied research, most of it in homeland security and the military, and away from the basic scientific research that economists say is the essential engine of future economic growth. They also expressed concern about those policies Washington was not pursuing but should be: broadening access to patents; increasing research into alternative fuels; and bringing information technology into the health care market.


Under President Bush, however, the GOP's natural economic policy tendencies have been hyper-charged by a grand political vision. Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, and other Republican strategists have argued that massive annual tax cuts and the privatization of Social Security will not only increase the flow of capital into the marketplace, but will also put Democrats at a long-term electoral disadvantage and usher in a new era of GOP dominance. That these policies also require the government to take on trillions of dollars in extra debt, just as the first baby boomers are reaching retirement and trade imbalances are reaching historic levels, is seen by GOP leaders as a risk worth
taking. And so the White House and Congress have pursued tax cutting and Social Security privatization with relentless focus, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

In other words, the GOP is willing to sacrifice our future
job prospects and our children’s economic future in order to create a
Republican dynasty in American politics that could take decades to overcome. The future we fear could be sooner than anyone predicts. Because technology is diffusing around the world in single digit years rather than the decades of the 20^th Century, the advantage Japan and Europe have in building Hybrid cars means the US automakers have to import technology heavy hardware to produce stateside. And the lead Japan has in nano-technology may never be overcome. South Korea has the majority of Internet users on broadband while at best the US is far behind. They are already developing movies and video productions for purchase worldwide. Many other industries will emerge from their lead.
Europe got a lead on hybrid vehicles by regulating fuel efficiency and charging high fuel taxes. The result is a clean high grade diesel burning hybrid that combines efficiency, clean exhaust with incredible mileage. Meanwhile, Bush commits our sons and daughters
to securing a dubious future oil supply. What we really need is renewable energy alternatives. The country that makes renewable energy work will dominate the future economy.
We need to be rearranging our priorities before the world leaves us in the dust.

America Number 1?

Nothing is more important to most Americans than being number one. It's an emotional attachment and at least partially reponsible for support for military adventures like the one in Iraq. It's initial support was directly related to the insult and injury felt by Americans after 9/11. Why do you think Bush did everything he could to connect Iraq with the "War on Terror"?
The sad thing is that America is already going the way of Rome. The US is in decline. Unless we quickly respond to the challenge, it in a few short decades be irreversible. Our educational system is no longer considered the best by the rest of the world. American young adults that enter the job market every year are less qualified than previous years.
Will we wake up? The first step is acknowledging we are no longer number one. Jimmy Carter tried to give us an heads up about our "malaise", but no one wanted to hear it.
This is only an excerpt. The whole thing is a must read.
City Pages - America No. 1?

> "The European Union leads the U.S. in...the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).
> "Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70).
> Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).
> Foreign applications to U.S. grad schools declined 28 percent last year. Foreign student enrollment on all levels fell for the first time in three decades, but increased greatly in Europe and China. Last year Chinese grad-school graduates in the U.S. dropped 56 percent, Indians 51 percent, South Koreans 28 percent (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004). We're not the place to be anymore.
> "The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens" (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a "developed" country? Anyway, that's the company we're keeping.
> Lack of health insurance coverage causes 18,000 unnecessary American deaths a year. (That's six times the number of people killed on 9/11.) (NYT, Jan. 12, 2005.)
> "U.S. childhood poverty now ranks 22nd, or second to last, among the developed nations. Only Mexico scores lower" (The European Dream, p.81). Been to Mexico lately? Does it look "developed" to you? Yet it's the only "developed" country to score lower in childhood poverty.
> Twelve million American families--more than 10 percent of all U.S. households--"continue to struggle, and not always successfully, to feed themselves." Families that "had members who actually went hungry at some point last year" numbered 3.9 million (NYT, Nov. 22, 2004).

State Lawmakers Rebuke Bush's "No Child Left Behind" Law

During his State of the Union address, Bush lauds his "No Child Left Behind" law as the centerpiece of his education policy. One minor fact was left out: the law actually undermines its own goals. Dubya is such a duffus. But Doublethink Dubya can claim a disaster like Iraq where 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a triumph!
AP Wire | 02/23/2005 | State lawmakers target Bush's schools law

State lawmakers issued a scathing rebuke of President Bush's education overhaul on Wednesday, calling it a coercive, unconstitutional act that sets an unreachable goal of getting every child up to par in reading and math.


The National Conference of State Legislatures wants changes in the fundamental parts of the No Child Left Behind Act: how student progress is measured, how schools are punished if they fall short, and who decides when the rules are waived for struggling districts. Overall, the proposal would give states significantly more power to administer the law.


As a bipartisan statement from all 50 legislatures, the report is significant for its sweep and tone, underscoring tensions over which level of government has final say over education. Schools are traditionally a state matter, but the federal role has grown much more aggressive as Bush and Congress have ordered higher achievement among all students.


The new report contends the law leads to unintended consequences and that the federal government is indifferent to them - the lowering of academic standards, increasing segregation in school, and the driving away of top teachers from needy schools. It claims the government is also violating the Constitution by coercing state compliance.