Oakland Teacher Speaks Truth to Those Who Won't Assert Power

by Jack Gerson

On Saturday, Oakland public school teacher Craig Gordon  received the 2013 Human Rights Award from the Alameda/Contra Costa Counties Service Center (ALCOSTA) of the California Teachers Association, the statewide affiliate of the 3-million member National Education Association (NEA, the largest union in the U.S.) Here's a video of Craig's acceptance speech, in which he argues that CTA and NEA (and their local affiliates) must abandon their strategy of collaborating with and caving in to the demands of management, politicians, and corporate billionaires and undertake direct action and strikes statewide and nationally to fight privatization and to demand a bailout of schools and services not banks and corporations.

As you'll see on the video,  the audience gave Craig a standing ovation. But many of those standing and applauding are the very local and statewide CTA leaders who have for years blocked our efforts to fight, insisting that collaboration with management and reliance on Democratic politicians at the local and state levels was the most that could be done. Now, after mass teacher / student / community strikes and actions in Chicago last fall, these "leaders" no longer openly bash every mention of the word "strike" and / or the call for mass action at the local, state, and national level. But they still won't act. And it's not the word that matters, but the deed.

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Nursing homes: Get the corporations out of health care.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

The glorifying of Margaret Thatcher by the British ruling class and the vilification of her and her policies by British workers reveals the chasm that separates workers from bosses.  We are not on the same team despite all the propaganda to the contrary.  The British bourgeois are obligated to place one of their own on a pedestal and in an affront to us all, use taxpayer money to do it.  The queen of privatization gets a publicly funded going away party.

No champion of public services would receive such praise today.  The British National Health system is under ferocious attack in order to send it down the same privatization path as the housing, water, gas and transport industries that Thatcher’s and after, New Labor’s policies removed from the public domain.

Here in the US the propaganda against anything public is pervasive. In the mass media on television every minute of every day the market is put forward as the answer to all things despite the most powerful capitalist economy in the world being dragged from the edge of the abyss through a massive bailout by the taxpayers. The postal service, transportation, water, education and social security are all in the sights of the coupon clippers, the private equity lords, the hedge fund managers---------all those who brought us the Great Recession.

The most glaring failure of all is perhaps the health care system.  It is one of the most costly of all the advanced capitalist economies at about 18% of GDP and returns the least bang for the buck. Despite being privately run for the most part, Federal, state and local governments are projected to spend $2.4 trillion on health care in 2021, according to Bloomberg Business Week. This is half of all U.S. medical expenditures.  “Government accounted for about 46 percent of health spending through 2013.” BW adds. 

The private sector does very well out of the sickness industrial complex including many “libertarian”medical practitioners I’m sure. It is a very profitable business, for those who invest in it but not for the most vulnerable of us when we need it most; for those who need care in their later years.  

As Americans live longer the need for nursing home care grows.  By 2030, 73 million Americans will be 65 or over according US government estimates, up from 40 million in 2010.  There is already a Labor shortage in this industry as taking care of sick people, cleaning, comforting, moving them, emptying their diapers etc. does not warrant much respect like gambling on the price of pork bellies or mortgage rates.  Being a nurses’ aide is very hard, mentally and physically and the pay poor.  The Wall Street Journal today estimates, that five million “direct care” workers will be needed to meet demand, an increase in 48% from 2010.

While conditions in the entire industry need to improve, both workers and patients in the private nursing home facilities are among the most abused in any industry. The rate of occupational injury for nurse’s aides, who are mostly women, is higher than construction or factory work says the Journal. This also leads to a high turnover rate that is detrimental to the patients as well.  People with dementia can be extremely aggressive and workers can be punched, kicked, spat on and abused in all sorts of ways.  It is a great public service these workers provide and they are often the person closest to the patient who may rarely or sometimes never see a relative.  The pay is normally under $12 an hour and as a nurses’ aide at Harden’s nursing homes in Texas you can earn $8.25 an hour, a

whopping $1 above the minimum wage.

In 2011 the Government Accountability Office undertook an analysis of the country’s ten largest for-profit nursing home chains.  When compared to others, these top ten for-profit chains had:

• The lowest staffing levels;
• The highest number of deficiencies identified by public regulatory agencies; and
• The highest number of deficiencies causing harm or jeopardy to residents

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2011 that nursing facilities acquired between 2004 and 2007 by the top ten private equity firms:

• Had more total deficiencies than not-for-profit facilities;
• Reported lower total nurse staffing ratios; and
• Showed capital-related cost increases and higher profit margins, compared to other facilities. http://www.medicareadvocacy.org/2012/03/15/non-profit-vs-for-profit-nursing-homes-is-there-a-difference-in-care/

Higher profit margins are the key. If a “chain”of supermarkets or a “chain” of movie theaters must make profits, surely a “chain”of medical facilities for the elderly must. The term “chain” should be enough to put an end to such an arrangement; it’s as bad as the tem “flipping” the coupon clippers invented for trading in human shelter.  We are all witnessing what the market does to an industry when profits need boosting.  Who knows how many people die, how pervasive the suffering of these older people, especially when there are no living relatives and the taxpayer is paying the bills.  We don’t have to look much further than the aftermath of Katrina or other disasters to see how voraciously the entrepreneur, the private sector, dips their snouts in to the public trough.  Hedge funds and other Wall Street firms have bought thousands of these facilities over the years looking to make a buck.

A case in point is Habana Health Care; a Florida nursing home bought by a group of investment firms.

Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes. 

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken.“They’ve created a hellhole,”one woman whose mother died after a huge bedsore became infected by feces told the Times.  The New York Times:.

This woman and others sued Habana but suing these characters is much like the experience small farmers (those that haven’t been driven from their land yet) are having with Monsanto.* They have the money, you don’t, and in our system, money trumps morality or the righteous. It certainly trumps the views of a worker.  Nurse’s aides say that they have more residents to care for than they can handle.  This contributes to poor service. Of course the worker gets blamed for that, as their opinions are irrelevant.  The statement by a representative from the industry association carries much more weight and he says it’s “difficult” to determine whether inadequate staffing leads to a higher injury rate or poor care.

As for suing them, the NYT article also points out:

“But private investment companies have made it very difficult for plaintiffs to succeed in court and for regulators to levy chainwide fines by creating complex corporate structures that obscure who controls their nursing homes.”

“By contrast, publicly owned nursing home chains are essentially required to disclose who controls their facilities in securities filings and other regulatory documents.”

Disclosing ownership. That’s one thing investors don’t like to do and one of the many reasons public ownership is opposed.

Lew Little, the CEO of the aforementioned Harden Healthcare in Texas is very sympathetic say I sarcastically.  He tells the WSJ that, "These people are the actual backbone of nursing-home care.”  How nice of him, unfortunately though there’s nothing he can do, "We'd love to be in a position to increase aides' pay,..” he tells the Journal, but sees, "no clear path" for raising wages due to cuts in Medicaid and Medicare. He omits what might block that path and that is corporate profits.  It fact, it appears profits don’t exist; he just left them out. Little is the 2013 Chair of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and former president of Bank of America in Austin, just the man to supervise the care of older sick people. 

Another Harden VP is Chris Roussos who previously held management positions with King Pharmaceuticals and Élan Pharmaceuticals. These people are not who you want to manage the care of our sick and elderly unless they do so under the direction of a publicly controlled agency where their skills can be directed toward patient care as opposed to profit making.

In 1987, the US Congress enacted the Nursing Home Reform Act.  Unfortunately, “Congress has also been preoccupied with limiting expenditures. It has never appropriated sufficient funds to enforce the provisions of the Act or funded the personnel and training necessary to inspect nursing homes frequently and intensively.” Says Americans For Democratic Action.

Well this comes as no surprise. The problem is that Congress has been “preoccupied” all right; preoccupied with “appropriating sufficient funds”required for costly wars around the world on behalf of US corporations.  Preoccupied with bailing out bankers, hedge fund managers and other coupon clippers whose activities are a drain on society. Preoccupied with protecting the rights of those who own capital as opposed to those whose Labor creates it.

The market is not a friendly beast and capitalism is not a friendly system of production. This relatively small example of its inefficiency in relation to the global crisis of capitalism cannot be remedied permanently within the capitalist system.  The health of the members of society cannot be left in the hands of bankers and investors; it cannot be a business because for business profit comes first, and in the health care business, it comes before the health of the client.

As a socialist I see the only way to solve this is for the sickness industrial complex to be taken under public ownership and control. Those that use it and work in it from the surgeon to the orderly; the sick and the community whose members it serves both nationally and locally should govern it.  That would mean the pharmaceutical and all industries connected to medicine and its distribution including research and development. The money is there; it is simply misallocated which also means that the financial institutions and the allocation of capital has to become a collective process based on need not for profit.

In the immediate term, health care should be a public service available on demand for whoever needs it.  We need a national health care system in the US. In addition, we must raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour. 

Most nurses aides I’m sure want to do a good job, want to ensure their patients are treated well, but there is a limit to this. In a publicly managed and run nursing home system nurses aides could receive better training, work shorter hours, especially important due to the nature of the work, and the industry can be more transparent. Most importantly, our fathers, mothers, grandparents would be able to receive the care they deserve toward the end of their lives; they’ve earned it.

Let’s get the coupon clippers and big business out of health care.

* See the movie, Food Inc.

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How Wall Street Preys on Teacher Pensions

by Jack Gerson

Ten days ago Danny Weil published, on dailycensored.com, a scathing analysis of how the biggest predators on Wall Street have been invited in to plunder teacher pension funds -- especially in California and Texas, but throughout the country. Teacher pension trustees now say that there are vast "unfunded liabilities", and politicians like California Governor Jerry Brown are sharpening their knives while they provide quotes to the media about how funding for public employee pension obligations create budget deficits and force the state to impose harsh austerity cuts to essential public services. This is the prelude to demands for teachers and other public employees to accept cuts to their retirement income. Indeed, such proposals are already echoing in state houses and legislatures.

Investment from employee pension funds helped finance the boom on Wall Street. But when the crisis hit, Wall Street demanded -- and continues to demand -- multi-trillion dollar bailouts from the public by cuts in jobs and services to working and unemployed people. The big banks pretend to be "risk-takers" who deserve fat returns as compensation for their "risk". But as the story of teacher pension funds illustrates, it's our livelihoods-- our savings, our pensions, our essential services -- that are at risk. Not theirs. They demand and get bailed out over and again. And they admonish us for being so careless with how we let our money be invested (invested by them, of course).

One of the important points to take away from this article is the culpability of the state teacher union leadership in standing idly by while over the past five years Wall Street hedge funds swooped in to prey on the pension funds. The story of such financialization isn't unique to teacher pension funds. Big capital is financializing and privatizing whatever can be privatized and financialilzed, commodifying or recommodifying much of what has long been public, in the process, wresting away gains fought for and won by working people over the past century and a half. These austerity attacks won't go away until we make them go away.

But enough from me. Here's Danny's article, as originally published at dailycensored.com:

http://www.dailycensored.com/financial-capitalism-and-the-us-teachers-pension-fund-fraud/

Financial Capitalism and the US teachers’ pension fund fraud

Danny Weil

An “internal study” of the California Teachers’ Retirement System (Cal STRS) indicates that the public school pension fund faces a $64 billion deficit, according to the Sacramento Bee, dated  February 4, 2013 (http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/02/california-teachers-pension-fund-faces-64-billion-deficit.html#storylink=cpy=).
The California State Teachers Retirement System produced the report in response to a legislative resolution.  The release of the “internal study” followed on the heels of chiding by the Legislature’s budget analyst, Mac Taylor, who indirectly admonished neo-liberal Gov. Jerry Brown for ignoring “huge” unfunded liabilities associated with the teachers’ retirement system and state retiree health benefits” in his new ‘budget’.
Cal STRS receives money from the state, from local school districts and from teachers themselves, but the source of the funds income is also highly dependent on investment earnings.  Like most pension funds throughout through-out the nation, Cal STRS was decimated during the recent Great Depression that continues unabated. And while the California Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) has the power take money directly from the state treasury as it sees fit, STRS cannot; they must receive specific appropriations from the Legislature in order to fund the state teachers’ pensions.
Fully funding the California teachers’ pension fund, we are told, would require $4.5 billion more a year — excluding projected investment earnings.   The system in its report stated that the shortfall would be ‘eased’ by setting lower funding targets and/or stretching out contributions (ibid). This means less money for current and future retirees.  The most important financial move, Cal STRS fund managers said, is to begin closing the deficit, rather than allowing it to widen further.  Sound like calls for austerity?  Sure does, sure is.  But wait, there’s more, and it is truly nauseating, frightening and painfully keeping with the logic of capitalist economics.
Pension funds are now dressed up hedge funds with current and future disastrous consequences

According to a recent article found at Dollarcollapse.com, pension funds are now morphing into hedge funds, a virtual back alley crap game or what Dollarcollapse calls “rolling the dice in exotic investments”, for Wall Street and their minions (http://dollarcollapse.com/investing/pension-funds-become-hedge-funds-roll-the-dice-on-exotic-investments/).

In the report written by author, John Rubino on January 28^th, 2013, he notes that there was a time when running a pension fund used to be one of the more facile jobs in finance.  Money came in steadily and predictably from member contributions and the funds were then invested in AAA grade bonds and blue chip stocks.  The target was to meet a modest, but assured, annual return of 8% interest (ibid). Not anymore. That was before the financialization of capitalism and the economic collapse.
Now, as the author correctly notes, the pension funds in effect have two criminally incompetent overlords trying to serve two contradictory economic demands.  On the one hand, at the national and state level the US borrows too much and lets its banks go on an unregulated ‘wilding’ with dire consequences for working people.  This causes and has caused severe debt crisis’ to which the overseers of capital respond by lowering interest rates to the point where investment grade bonds, once the heart and soul of pension funds, yield next to nothing.
At the state and local level, the corporate owned governors and mayors refuse to raise taxes on their real constituency, the corporations and the rich, which would have the beneficial effect of balancing the funds; they instead pressure funds to continue to make their ‘vig’ of 8%.  This, even though not only is this stupidly optimistic, but it is wildly impossible.  So, what are the pension fund managers doing now?  They are doing what financial capital requires: they are acting like gambling casinos by increasingly turning the whole pension fund investment strategy into a dangerous explosive landmine, twisting them into hedge funds, all to the detriment of working people and to the advantage of Wall Street.
This is how financialization works.  It is a particular phase of capitalism where everything is monetized and commodified.  Take the Texas Teachers’ Retirement system as just one example.
Texas Teachers’ Retirement system
In his article, Rubino goes on to write about the Texas Teacher Retirement System.  According to Rubino:
“On the 13^th floor of a sleek downtown office building here, the trading desks are manned overnight.  The chief investment officer favors cowboy boots made of elephant skin.  And when a bet pays off, even the secretaries can be entitled to bonuses” (ibid).
We are not talking about a high flying private hedge fund but instead, these desks are manned for the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, similar to Cal STRS.  The public pension fund has 1.3 million members that include school teachers, bus drivers and cafeteria workers throughout the state.  They all labor under the assumption they will have retirement benefits they worked their entire lives for.
Yet rather than reduce risk in the wake of declines in interest rates, the pension fund manikins are now getting hostily aggressive, loading up on private equity investments and other non-traditional investments that they say promise to return pension funds to the halcyon days of steady and safe returns.
The Texas Teacher Retirement System fund has $114 billion dollars and now boasts some of the riskiest bets in its history with $30 billion dollars committed to private equity, real estate and other ‘so-called ‘alternative investments’ since early 2008, as the economic crash washed ashore like a Tsunami.  Amongst the ten largest U.S public pensions, this makes it the biggest such investor in Wall Street backed equity investments.  The funds currently have an average alternatives allocation of a whopping 21%!  Don’t let them fool you again.
According to tracker, Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service, the Texas Teacher Retirement System brought in an annual return of 3.1% between December 31, 2007 and December 31, 2012.  This was more than the average media return of 2.6% for similar years (ibid).
The argument made by the pension investment officials for their investment in Wall Street is that investment in private equity is necessary to help offset declines in other investments it is embedded in.  So, we are told that investment in Wall Street is necessary to assure adequate pay-outs to current and future retirees.  Sound familiar?  The Chief Investment Officer for the workers’ pension moneys, Britt Harris, says he can perform miracles in light of the deteriorating state of US financial capitalism and “smash” the reality that government pension funds area on the short end of most investments — another one of those economic genies of trading.
So, with this particular shortsightedness and love for free markets, in November 2011 the Texas fund made one of the largest single commitments in the private equity system’s history: they invested $3 billion dollars in KKR and another Wall Street parasite, the Apollo Global management group (APO).  Three months later, unbeknownst to the vast majority of fund members, they bought $250 million dollars of the world’s largest hedge fund firm with member monies – Bridgewater Associates out of Connecticut.  This marked the first time time in history that a U.S public pension fund has purchased such a large stake in private equities, betting member dollars as if they were players in a casino roulette game.
The result was a return for the fiscal year ending on August 31, 2011 that was 7.6%.  Now pension ‘managers’ say they can help the fund reach its goal of 8% annually over the long haul and they are proceeding full speed ahead.  In a ten year period ending in August of 31, 2012 the Texas Teacher Retirement System had an annual return of 7.4% (ibid).
Of course none of the investments had the approval of working people who fund the retirement system.  This is partly due to the enormous task of investing but mainly due to lack of democratic decision making and oversight which is the nasty business that pension fund managers, in cahoots with Wall Street, loathe.  Nothing could be worse than having the wolves of capital in their elephant skin boots subjected to transparency and member oversight.
And just where were the teacher unions and bus driver unions and cafeteria worker unions when all this was happening?  They were nowhere in sight.  Their ‘bosses’ either didn’t know, care or understand the haughty risk the pension weasels were making on behalf of their members.  The fat cat union bosses have shown a penchant for Wall Street and neo-liberalism in general, favoring begging over bargaining and fancy luncheons with powerful paid for politicians and wealth managers over their fiduciary duty of member oversight.  They prefer to be team members rather than looking out for their real members, working people who are drastically declining in numbers as privatization clouds the horizon and economic decimation provides the meat for the noxious roux.
The average teacher, bus driver and cafeteria worker simply wants to do their job and to make a living, feed their children and provide for retirement, a chore that is not possible under the current regime of capital.  Mis-education and a lack of critical thinking skills have left workers prey for the wolves of high-finance while the pension managers ski in Aspen, buy fancy boots and otherwise screw over workers by investing in a system of mendacity and despair that has proven time and time again to be a time bomb.  All this while Wall Street gets fatter, bonuses are given out with impunity and privatization squeezes the life out of civil society.
Leveraging workers’ pension through debt
This grand charade is all about leveraging debt, which is the specialty of Wall Street and their cronies.  “Leverage’ relies on borrowing more and more sums of cash and then using derivatives (phony insurance) to make large investments in Wall Street.  In this way the funds don’t have to put up as much cash – money they don’t have anyway.  It is like borrowing on credit cards to buy stocks and bonds but it is much worse, for it is not an individual problem, it is a socio-economic one that promises to drive the funds right down the same path as the banking crisis and housing “bubble” that brought down whole countries and economies, like Greece.  All of this is great for Wall Street and death for workers.
But never mind:  for the money changers, such as the world’s largest hedge fund firm, Bridgewater Associates and a numerically growing number of hedge fund bosses state, this type of leveraging is not like that which crashed banks, devasted lives, washed worker bodies onto the shoreline of despair and economic ruin and left them in peonage; it, they say, is “different.  Not to worry this time, these deacons of depravity and greed say they are firmly and safely in control of the financialization scheme which of course is tantamount to saying that an alcoholic is in control of his or her own addiction or the military industrial complex has a firm hand on the tiller of cost control.
They have even bent the language to their own self-serving advantage, a sophist’s tool, and they now call this ‘financial strategy’ “risk parity” (ibid).  There are many such criminal firms such as AQR Capital Management and the Clifton Group out of Minneapolis who are greedily sucking their fingers in anticipation of their own bonuses, capital gains and primitive accumulation strategies which promise to make them even more super-rich than they currently are and allow managers and executives to reap heady bonuses.
When questioned, the minions of Wall Street who serve as the real shadow managers of the funds say that they are using a modest amount of leveraging and assure workers and you, the reader, that this is what makes their strategy brilliant and different from those employed by investment banks.  Do not be beguiled, this is the same strategy that created the largest transfer of wealth into the pockets of the one percent in the history of the world.
Of course it is not only a self-serving lie and unthinkable ruse, but it is unsustainable.  The chickens will come home to roost just as they did in the bankster fraud and housing debacle.  Cannibal financial groups like Bridgewater and their founder Ray Dalio, like the matchstick men they are, have pitched the idea to other pension fund ‘trustees’ and have even made a documentary style online video about the Ponzi scheme.
They all employ the same rapacious rap.  According to an interview with Bridgewater con-man, Ray Dalio:
“Ironically, by increasing your risk in the bonds you are going to lower your risk in the overall portfolio” (ibid).
This is the voice of American greed and it resounds well within the halls of depravity that is Wall Street which profits off of economic demolition and looks to take stumbling pensions down the road of economic purgatory.
The California State Teacher Retirement System
And of course this leads us back to Cal STRS.  With a shortfall such as that borne by the California pension fund, one can imagine this Nigerian web scam to be swallowed by the pension bosses here in California and elsewhere, who manage workers’ money for a profit, but do so with disdain for the workers’ themselves and a penchant for tying themselves to the crap game of casino capitalism.  These con artists avoid having to answer questions about such “innovations” such as day trading during the high tech stock bubble and house flipping during the housing boom, practices that are hardly innovative but more about yawing financial appetites and greed.  Remember these hideous practices were also sold under the auspices of ingenuity at the time they were fathomed but soon became to be known as criminal practices and investment ruses that were devastating for working people.
My wife is currently receiving disability retirement benefits from the California State Teacher Retirement System.  In this year, her check payment for February was lower than that paid in January.  She has written Cal STRS to find out why and is awaiting a reply Cal STRS says they will have put in her “in-box” online at their website in 20 days.  But as the clock runs out on her health and her funds quickly deliquesce, one can only view the financialization con with disgust and wonder how many other retired teachers who have devoted their lives to children will be affected.
This is all part of the privatization plot favored by Jerry Brown, enemy of the working class and cozy operator for the ruling class.  To avoid having to raise taxes on corporations and the rich who invest in him, Brown and the pension fund managers have created low hanging fruit for Bridgewater and other such criminal enterprises.  Remember, we are talking about billions of dollars here, even trillions of dollars in public pension funds.
So now you know the sordid tale of pension funds and pension leveraging, a seat at the black jack table for workers and a prime example of rapture capital accumulation for the rich.  If the practices are allowed to continue should you be a public school teacher, much like a worker who pays into Social Security, you will eventually find there is no security, that the system is rigged and the hefty bubble subject to burst.
Meanwhile, Wall Street fat cats get fatter, receive hefty  bonuses for wrangling the funds into Wall Street, and get larger all while more elephants are slayed and workers’ lives for the bootlicking fund managers drown in unpayable debt as worker retirement becomes merely a sultry dream to be replaced by homelessness, financial ruin, suicide, sorrow and decimation.
If you thought such heady political gimmicks like proposition 30 would help stave off economic devastation for underfunded schools or even staunch the bleeding inherent in the mendacious system of financial capitalism, you were wrong.  The only thing that can bring about security and equality for those who work and the public educational sector is class consciousness, education, organization and mobilization.  Anything less is a fool’s game.  It is time working people in conjunction with the students and communities they serve go on the offensive and not be forced to crouch into the corner of defensiveness.  But this will largely have something to do with how we see the world and how our perceptions are managed by a ruling class that understands very well this moment in history; a ruling class that like other monarchies of old, is more class conscious than its labor counterparts.
Meanwhile, my wife waits for an answer in her on-line ‘inbox’ from the unaccountable Cal STRS fund managers who don’t give a damn about how much she contributed to society, her growing physical disability or her future.  We will let you know if and when we get their reply.  In the meantime, organize, educate and mobilize: this is the only hope we have.

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Defend the USPS: No closures, no cuts no layoffs

by Richard Mellor

The Stalinists that ran the old Soviet Union were a ruthless bunch.  But their propaganda was fairly crude and unimaginative given that if you disagreed with them you were either shot, hospitalized in a psychiatric ward or sent to Siberia. No one believed them anyway.

The propaganda we are faced with in the advanced capitalist economies, especially in the US where deception is an art form, is much more persuasive and pernicious in some ways.

There is a massive propaganda campaign now to convince us that we can’t have the past postal service we’ve had for almost 250 years because society can’t afford it.  Theheadline in my local paper today is more propaganda about this ongoing crisis in the United States Postal System (USPS).  Before I get in to this I should stress that the USPS is the most efficient business or service in the United States. It was founded in 1775 and guarantees that every town, village and community should have access to a postal service.  As part of the attacks on all public services and property in order to pay for the corporate wars and expansion abroad, the USPS must be cut down to size. 

Today’s issue is eliminating Saturday delivery on the road to total privatization.  This could save $2 billion a year and will eliminate 25,000 postal service jobs.  These 25,000 will be through attrition which means eliminating opportunities to earn a decent living for thousands of young people. “Our financial condition is urgent”, Postmaster General Patrick Donahue announces in the media, “This is too higb a cost savings for us to ignore.”

Apparently, the USPS is losing money-, $15 billion last year by most estimates.  But what does that mean?  The Post Office receives no government funding.  It is efficient in that its goal of providing every community with service is met. It is particularly important to some rural areas where the local PO is almost like a community center.  The USPS is a public service and profit doesn’t enter in to it.  Like health care, education, transportation, energy, water, sewage etc. these services are crucial to a healthy society and should not be ran on the profit basis.

But like Social Security, the private sector wants to get its grubby little snout in to the public trough.  Public money pushes private capital and a chance for profit taking out of the marketplace. Not only does a vibrant public sector crowd private capital from the market it provides a more humane and better work environment with better vacations, sick leave, and pensions than private firms.  The coupon clippers and hedge fund managers don’t like this, having social services and benefits eat in to profits and undermining their view that the market and capitalism is the answer to all things.; and they might have to sell that second home in Malibu. They aren’t interested in the welfare of society as a whole, they worship the wisdom of JP Morgan who proudly admitted, “I owe the public nothing.”

This is what they want to eliminate and the USPS has provided a decent living for thousands of workers, especially women and people of color. When they close some 4000 post offices in some rural areas old and disabled people will have to find their way in to town or the nearest mall so they can mail a letter.

When I was active in my Union we always fought our employers attempts to contract out our work and fought for increased public employment.  But the USPS is increasingly using outside contractors, including competitors. In 2012, the USPS, “..spent more than $12 billion on such contracts, according to Husch Blackwell, a law firm that represents Postal Service contractors. (Huff Post Money)

Those so-called guardians of our well being, the folks that run our country, have already borrowed $2 trillion dollars for their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are being fought by the young people that won’t get that post office job that they want to eliminate. Perhaps they might be one of the 800,000 veterans of these predatory wars who receive government medical care.   The free marketers are not too keen in getting involved in that business, there’s no profit to be had.  That’s what will happen with the post office.  Efficiency to the Donald Trumps and Warren Buffets of this world is profit on capital and the socialist" benefits it gives them. The welfare of society is no concern of theirs.

Two big supporters of privatizing the USPS are doing OK. Darrell Issa, a Congressman from California and CEO of a tech company is the wealthiest man in Congress worth some half billion dollars. He’s one of those they describe as a “self made man” but there is no such thing. All these people had a leg up, had someone help them. You don’t get rich through good honest productive labor. Another advocate is the Oaklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a doctor, son of an optical industrialist and preacher. 

That someone can be a doctor, or a preacher and support the measures these thugs do shows you how little religious teaching and Hippocratic oaths mean in the real world. The propaganda that these services need the hand of business to make them serve us better is nonsense.  They serve us better even when run by administrators of a capitalist government.  The problem is that they are undermined repeatedly in order to prove how inefficient they are because their success undermines their argument that private is better.

Even the Labor leaders make this argument, that the post office would be more efficient if it was “run like a business.”.  This is how deeply affected we are by the propaganda of Wall Street, the capitalist mass media and those that buy it. There is no doubt that it could be more efficiently run if  more efficiently means providing service for our communities and a safe, secure and decent living for its workers. It should be funded adequately just like education. And how it is run or operates, should be determined through its administration by workers who provide the service both professional skilled and unskilled and those of us who receive this service.

The USPS needs $15 billion, so lets get it $15 billion.  The corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash.  Warren Buffet, one human being, is worth four times that or close to it. He never earned that, its source is the collective Labor of millions of Americans and past generations whose children have also died fighting wars to protect this arrangement.

Then there is the $26 trillion, perhaps more, that is stashed in offshore accounts by the world’s super rich. Keep that figure in mind when someone tells you society can’t afford the USPS, that it can’t provide education, health care transportation and jobs for all. We have to keep our eyes on the prize and reject their propaganda.  We must not start from a position of what needs to be cut but how we can add to what we’ve got; how we can expand services not eliminate them. The money is there, it is how it is allocated, how we use the wealth our labor creates. 

We have been passive too long.  Our history is a revolutionary one, we have to return to these roots and go on the offensive We must reject the false notion that we keep our mouths shut, put our noses to the grindstone and hope it will get better----it will not.  It is not easy as the Union leaders who could change the balance of class forces have completely capitulated to the bosses and we have no political party of our own while Wall Street has two.

But as Pericles said: "Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."  It already has and the consequences are dire if we continue to try and escape rather than confront it. But the first step is rejecting the propaganda.

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Support Garfield High (Seattle) Boycott of High Stakes Tests

By Jack Gerson

A boycott of standardized tests -- launched earlier this month when teachers at Seattle's Garfield High voted unanimously to refuse to administer the districtwide Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test -- has attracted national attention as well as support from parent and teacher groups locally and nationally.  Teachers at some other Seattle schools have joined the boycott, while many others have sent letters of support.  The Seattle Parent Teacher Student Association, the Seattle Student Senate, and many leading education activists and researchers have also issued support statements.

Today -- Wednesday, January 30 -- is a national call/phone/fax day to tell Seattle Public Schools that you, your organization and / or your union stand with the Garfield test boycotters. Send your message to Seattle Schools Superintendent José Banda:

Phone: (206) 252-0180
Fax: (206) 252-0209
Email: superintendent@seattleschools.org

 The MAP tests were created by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a non-profit corporation with ties to Bill Gates and Eli Broad, billionaire architects of the corporate assault on education.  They were brought to Seattle by former schools superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, herself a graduation of Eli Broad’s Urban Superintendents Academy, who spent more than $4 million of public school funds for them. This was a blatant conflict of interest: Goodloe-Johnson never even bothered to disclose that she was on the board of NWEA before, during, and after she contracted to buy the MAP tests. 

Far worse, though, are the tests themselves.  Teachers and schools are held accountable for student test scores on MAP – in fact, the district wants to use MAP scores in teacher evaluations – but Garfield teachers say that these tests don’t test what they’re supposed to – they are not aligned to curricula.  They penalize low-income and special education students:  the tests are administered on computers; low-income students in under-resourced schools have far less access to computers than students from affluent families, while MAP testing denies special education students the accommodations they often need to effectively interact with computers.

This is an old story:  deny resources to those who need them the most, increasing inequality. Then use poorly designed and arbitrarily applied tests to “measure” student achievement, and blame students, teachers, and "low-achieving" schools for their “failure”.  Naturally, the students who score lowest are those who suffer most from social inequality – children from low-income families, and especially those from black and Latino families. And, of course, the overtesting mania rewards rote learning and spitting out the “right” answer – blind obedience --over concepts, creativity, and independent thinking.

Rather than provide what’s really needed -- more resources for schools and, most importantly, massive public programs to combat the effects of poverty and reduce social inequality – schools are told to “do more with less” while essential public services are cut or eliminated.  And then schools are closed, experienced teachers are laid off, destabilizing neighborhoods and increasing social inequality.  More schools closed, more neighborhoods destabilized, more young people consigned to the streets, the military, or prison. In this way, high stakes testing reproduces and deepens the class and racial divisions and inequality that are at the heart of the problem.

Teachers, parents, and education activists have come out strongly in support of the Garfield teachers and their test boycott.  What about the leaders of the two huge national teacher unions, the 3 million member National Education Association (NEA) and the 1.7 million member American Federation of Teachers (AFT)?  Well, in fact, the presidents of the NEA (Dennis van Roekel) and the AFT (Randi Weingarten) have each said that they support the teachers boycott. But they haven’t lifted a finger to demonstrate real support. Teachers – and parents – across the country are fed up with overtesting. With an investment of some of their massive resources, NEA and AFT could spread the boycott to thousands of schools, organize mass support rallies, and make the simple and direct connections between the fight against high stakes testing and the fight against the cuts to education and other essential public programs. In other words: they could use the fight against high stakes testing as a springboard to kick off a national campaign against austerity. But they’re not about to do that – at least not on their own initiative. They’re not about to break with Barack Obama and the Democrats. They’re not about to clash with “responsible business leaders”. Instead, they’re going to continue to embrace the “team concept” of labor / corporate / government collaboration – the same policy that accelerated the decimation of U.S. private sector unions.

But that doesn’t mean that these fights aren’t coming.  Parents and community can now see the corporate “reform” for what it is: shutting down schools and overall downsizing of public education; charter schools, test prep mills, consultants and contractors and overall privatization; forcing out experienced teachers and overall union-busting.  And in many communities, it’s understood that the corporate assault on education is an integral part of “shared sacrifice” austerity, and that the only ones sacrificing are working and unemployed families.  And we’re fighting back: three years ago, in the California movement against cuts to education; two years ago, in the massive struggle in Wisconsin against cuts and union-busting, kicked off by students and teachers in Madison high schools; last year, in the massive and groundshaking Occupy movement; and just four months ago, in the powerful teacher and  community alliance manifested in the Chicago teacher strike.

So, let’s make those phone calls, send those faxes, post those emails to let Seattle Schools Superintendent José Banda know that there’s massive support out here for the Garfield teachers and their boycott of Seattle’s high stakes MAP tests. Here’s Banda’s contact info:

Phone:  (206) 252-0180

Fax:       (206)  252-0209

Email:   superintendent@seattleschools.org

It’s a start. It can lead to more. 

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AFT, NEA, and the Privatization Drive Against Public Education

By Jack Gerson

Last weekend I spoke in San Francisco on a panel that addressed the topic:  "Public Education, Privatization and The NEA/CTA, SEIU and AFT/CFT-What Can Education Workers, Students & Parents Do To Defend Public Education?"   My presentation was recorded by the Labor Video Project and it's now up on YouTube:

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