Mc CLATCHY

Study: Many college students not learning to think critically

By Sara Rimer, The Hechinger Report | The Hechinger Report

NEW YORK — An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education.

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn't determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.

Arum, whose book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.

The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups.

"I'm not surprised at the results," said Stephen G. Emerson, the president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. "Our very best students don't study in groups. They might work in groups in lab projects. But when they study, they study by themselves."

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

"These findings are extremely valuable for those of us deeply concerned about the state of undergraduate learning and student intellectual engagement," said Brian D. Casey, the president of DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. "They will surely shape discussions about curriculum and campus life for years to come."

Some educators note that a weakened economy and a need to work while in school may be partly responsible for the reduced focus on academics, while others caution against using the study to blame students for not applying themselves.

Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education known for his theory of multiple intelligences, said the study underscores the need for higher education to push students harder.

"No one concerned with education can be pleased with the findings of this study," Gardner said. "I think that higher education in general is not demanding enough of students — academics are simply of less importance than they were a generation ago."

But the solution, in Gardner's view, shouldn't be to introduce high-stakes tests to measure learning in college because, "The cure is likely to be worse than the disease."

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.

"In all these 24 colleges and universities, you have pockets of kids that are working hard and learning at very high rates," Arum said. "There is this variation across colleges, but even greater variation within colleges in how much kids are applying themselves and learning."

For that reason, Arum added, he hopes his data will encourage colleges and universities to look within for ways to improve teaching and learning.

Arum co-authored the book with Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. The study, conducted with Esther Cho, a researcher with the Social Science Research Council, showed that students learned more when asked to do more.

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Greater gains in liberal arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study's authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages a week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning.

That's welcome news to liberal arts advocates.

"We do teach analytical reading and writing," said Ellen Fitzpatrick, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire.

The study used data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a 90-minute essay-type test that attempts to measure what liberal arts colleges teach and that more than 400 colleges and universities have used since 2002. The test is voluntary and includes real world problem-solving tasks, such as determining the cause of an airplane crash, that require reading and analyzing documents from newspaper articles to government reports.

The study's authors also found that large numbers of students didn't enroll in courses requiring substantial work. In a typical semester, a third of students took no courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week. Half didn't take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the semester.

The findings show that colleges need to be acutely aware of how instruction relates to the learning of critical-thinking and related skills, said Daniel J. Bradley, the president of Indiana State University and one of 71 college presidents who recently signed a pledge to improve student learning.

"We haven't spent enough time making sure we are indeed teaching — and students are learning — these skills," Bradley said.

Christine Walker, a senior at DePauw who's also student body president, said the study doesn't reflect her own experience: She studies upwards of 30 hours a week and is confident she's learning plenty. Walker said she and her classmates are juggling multiple non-academic demands, including jobs, to help pay for their education and that in today's economy, top grades aren't enough.

"If you don't have a good resume," Walker said, "the fact that you can say, 'I wrote this really good paper that helped my critical thinking' is going to be irrelevant."

(This article was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.)

The 'new normal' of unemployment

Mainstream economists are preaching a decade of pain and historically high joblessness – as if no alternative policy existed



Dean Baker

• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 15 January 2011 14.00 GMT

Most economists predict that after this recession, even allowing for economic recovery, the US unemployment rate will stay stubbornly a percentage point or two above the historic norm. Photograph: Robert Galbraith/Reuters

The American Economics Association held its annual meeting in Denver last weekend. Most attendees appeared to be in a very forgiving mood. While the economists in Denver recognised the severity of the economic slump hitting the United States and much of the world, there were few who seemed to view this as a serious failure of the economics profession.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of economists in policy positions failed to see the signs of this disaster coming, and supported the policies that brought it on, did not seem to be a major concern for most of the economists at the convention. Instead, they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models.

The conventional wisdom among economists is that the economy will be forced to go through a long adjustment process before it can get back to more normal rates of unemployment. The optimists put the return to normal at 2015, while the pessimists would put the year as 2018, and possibly, even later.

Furthermore, many economists believe that the new normal will be worse than the old normal. The unemployment rate bottomed out at 4.5% before the housing bubble began to burst. If we go back to 2000, the United States had a year-round average unemployment rate of just 4.0%. The optimists now envision that normal would be 5.0% unemployment, while the pessimists put the new normal at 6.0% unemployment and perhaps higher. As a point of reference, every percentage point rise in the unemployment corresponds to more than 2 million additional people without jobs.

The willingness of economists to so quickly embrace this darker future is striking. After all, one of the reasons that we have economists is, ostensibly, so that we don't get such unpleasant news about a "new normal". This is like a football team calmly accepting the sports writers' prediction that they would have a winless season, and deciding that their new goal was to minimise the margin of defeat.

The prospect of an extended period of higher unemployment would be easier to accept if there was a good argument as to why the economy cannot achieve the same levels of employment as it had in the recent past. Economists really don't have much basis for this lowering of expectations of their own and the economy's performance.

The main argument seems to stem from the work of two economists, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, who have examined financial crises around the world. Their analysis finds that, in most cases, it has taken countries roughly a decade to recover from the effects of a financial crisis and return to a more normal growth path.

There is an important limitation in the Reinhart and Rogoff analysis. Most of the crises they examine were in the distant past, before the development of modern economics and its bag of tools. If the thousands of economists gathered in Denver know anything more about economics than those not educated in the field, then it would be reasonable to expect better outcomes than in prior centuries.

After all, through most of human history a large portion of children died in their first years of life. However, with modern medicine and good nutrition, infant mortality is a rare event in wealthy countries. By the Reinhart and Rogoff extrapolation, we would still expect most children to be dying before the age of five, based on the historical experience.

The methods for generating demand are not a mystery. It basically amounts to the government spending more money until the private sector is again in a position to fuel demand. The fears of deficits and debt that the pessimists promote stem from a misunderstanding of basic economics. Deficits can be a problem when they crowd out private economic activity. In a severe slump like the current one, this crowding-out is not a realistic fear; there are vast amounts of idle resources. Furthermore, there is no reason that the debt needs to pose an interest burden on taxpayers in the future. The Fed and other central banks can simply buy and hold the debt, refunding the interest payments to the government.

If economists did their job, they would be pushing policies to get the economy quickly back to full employment. Instead, they just repeat lines about how "we" will just have to accept some rough times. Unfortunately, no one ever asks the economists who preach austerity how much time they expect to spend in the unemployment lines.

If they don't know anything, then why should we listen to them?

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY

AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

Many Americans Face Economic Catastrophe -- Why Do the Political and Media Establishments Ignore Their Suffering?

Our leaders appear to be oblivious to the profound economic pain the majority of Americans are experiencing.

January 14, 2011 |

This is what a broken economic model looks like: record profits for corporate America, Wall Street paying out fat bonuses to its execs and the wealthy doing well enough to create a surge in demand for luxury items, while most of the rest of us struggle just to make ends meet in a devastated economic landscape.

You've no doubt heard about the unemployment numbers and the alarming number of Americans losing their homes, but a series of reports that paint a stunningly vivid picture of the human toll of the meltdown – the intense pain felt by the unemployed, the under-employed and the working poor – have gotten less play, in large part because while most of the U.S. remains in the grip of what appears to be a Second Great Depression, the political and media establishment largely ignores -- or at least underplays – the economic catastrophe a huge number of families are experiencing.

Part of the reason for that disconnect is simply that corporate America is sitting on record profits, and the stock market has by and large rebounded from its bottom. It's also due to the fact that a country as large as the U.S. doesn't really have a single economy; we live and work in a number of state and regional economies. And the Washington DC metropolitan area is doing very well – its residents are living in an economy completely divorced from the one in which many Americans are desperately trying to stay afloat.

The unemployment rate in DC is 6 percent – more than a third lower than the nationwide rate of 9.4 percent. It added more net jobs in 2010 than any other area in the U.S. In 2008, before the crash, residents of the metropolitan area enjoyed the third highest incomes in the U.S.; since the meltdown, their wages have remained well above the national average. (It's worth noting, however, that according to the Washington Post, the political class's newfound obsession with cutting the deficit may put a damper on the DC area's fortunes in the coming years as tens of thousands of public sector jobs are killed off.)

Now consider how the capital region is doing compared to the rest of the country. Unemployment has stood at over 9 percent for 20 consecutive months, the longest stretch since the Great Depression. The Wall Street Journal reported that this persistently high level of joblessness is resulting in a “steep, lasting” drop in wages. “Between 2007 and 2009,” wrote the Journal's Sudeep Reddy, “more than half the full-time workers who lost jobs that they had held for at least three years and then found new full-time work ... reported wage declines” and over a third of those workers “reported the new job paid at least 20% less than the one they lost.” That kind of income drop dwarfs that of previous post-war recessions.

Some among that number have been forced to accept minimum-wage jobs. And according to Jeannette Wicks-Lim, a scholar at the University of Massachusetts' Political Economy Research Institute (PDF), almost nine out of 10 full-time minimum-wage workers can't afford the basic necessities of life, which she defined as making enough “to protect them from serious economic hardships such as worrying about food, relying on a hospital emergency room to meet their health care needs, and having their utilities shut off.”

What many don't understand about the grim reality of the American labor market is that its impact on workers who have faced extended unemployment can reverberate for decades – long after the economy has recovered. Columbia University labor economist Till von Wachter studied the fortunes of workers who faced sudden lay-offs during the 1981-1982 recession in the period since that time. He found that even after 15 to 20 years, those workers' wages were still 20 percent lower than comparable workers who had held onto their jobs in the early 1980s downturn.

According to the Journal, the impact of this kind of joblessness can span generations:

Research shows that children of workers who lose jobs and go back to work at lower wages appear to suffer from lower wages, too. In a 2008 study, a group of economists tracked the wages of 60,000 father-child pairs from 1978 to 1999. Children whose fathers went through mass layoffs in the 1982 recession ended up with 9% lower earnings than similar children whose fathers didn't experience the job cuts.

The toll lengthy unemployment takes can't be overstated. Six of 10 jobless Americans report having to borrow money from friends or family; more than a quarter have been forced to change their living arrangements – taking roommates or moving to cheaper places – a third have missed mortgage payments; almost one in 10 have declared bankruptcy and nearly 20 percent have “sought professional help in the past year for a stress-related disorder or depression,” according to research conducted by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers' University.

Those holding onto their jobs aren't doing that well, either. According to the same study, almost four in 10 say the recession has had a “major” impact on their lives, a majority characterize their personal financial situation as “fair” or “poor,” and almost six in 10 have taken on debt to get by.

This year, the Census Bureau responded to criticism that its poverty measure tended to undercount the poor by releasing a new, more comprehensive metric. According to the new “supplemental” measure, almost 16 percent of Americans are living in poverty today. But the official rates still don't tell the full story of American poverty; according to the 2009 threshold, a family of four struggling to get by on $22,500 – a “poor” family by any estimation – fell above the official poverty line. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development uses a rather straightforward measure – anyone making less than half of the media income is considered to be living in poverty. By that standard, long before the crash, in the mid-2000s, our poverty rate ranked third among OECD countries – bested only by that of Mexico and Turkey – at over 17 percent.

The housing market is clearly in Depression territory. In November, real estate prices fell for the 53rd straight month, and CNBC reports that average values have now dropped by 26 percent since 2006, just edging out the decline in home prices between 1928 and 1933. “What’s worse,” notes the business news service, is that “it’s not over yet: Home values are expected to continue to slide as inventories pile up, and likely won't recover until the job market improves.” And the job market isn't expected to improve significantly for several years.

We're stuck in a vicious cycle -- consumer demand is in the tank and likely to stay that way until the jobs crisis begins to ebb and the housing market stabilizes, and yet neither of those things is likely to happen until consumer demand picks up and spurs companies to start hiring.

The public rejects the Right's explanation for this dismal reality. According to the Rutger's study, 90 percent of the population believe that the unemployed really want to work; 54 percent said “the federal government should fund programs that create jobs for the unemployed even if the debt goes up” as a result.

But they also reject the standard Keynesian remedy for such a bleak outlook – about three-quarters of those surveyed dismissed the idea of an additional stimulus package out of hand.

That leads to the question of what, exactly, can pull the economy out of this kind of downturn. Last year, economist Robert Reich wrote that the “economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.”

Since the 1981-'82 recession, the economy has been on a roller-coaster of boom-and-bust – starting with the 1980s financial boom fueled by corporate raiders leading to the 1992 recession, which gave way to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, which led to the 2000-2001 recession, which we got through riding the housing bubble that eventually deposited us where we find ourselves today. Economists are at a loss predicting where a new and sustainable engine of job growth might emerge.

A new economic model for the 21st century is necessary, and will require bold ideas that may not hew neatly to our traditional left-right paradigm. But that kind of thinking can only come with a sense of urgency – an appreciation for the destructive depth of this Depression. With Washington ensconced in a serviceable, even relatively healthy economy, that urgency just hasn't been forthcoming.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

AlterNet.org

NEWS & POLITICS

AlterNet / By Rose Aguilar

85-Year-Old-Woman Arrested for Bank Protest -- 6 Revolts the Tea Party-Obsessed Corporate Media Overlooked

Some of the most undercovered stories of 2010 were actions taken by ordinary people standing up for a more just and equitable society.

January 17, 2011 |

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King Jr.

Some of the most undercovered stories of 2010 were actions taken by ordinary people standing up for a more just and equitable society. People are taking to the streets on a regular basis across the country, but unlike the corporate-sponsored Tea Party -- whose spokespeople can't answer basic questions about the deficit they claim to be so worried about -- those who believe in health care, affordable housing, economic justice, education, a living wage, and a better life for all rarely, if ever, get the attention they deserve. Instead, the media, even the alternative media, spent the better part of last year obsessing over the Tea Party and manufactured personalities like Sarah Palin, while ignoring people like 85-year-old Julia Botello.

Last month, Botello was among 22 people arrested for blocking the doors of a Chase Bank branch in downtown Los Angeles. Over 200 people, many of them homeowners facing foreclosure and eviction, took part in the action organized by Home Defenders League and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

According to the Alliance, these families have never participated in an event or protest before, but they have exhausted all other options. Imagine if over 200 Tea Partiers took part in a similar action. Imagine if an 85-year-old Tea Party member was photographed being led away by two cops, one holding each arm. Not only would this video footage be shown over and over again on the cable shows, Julia Botello would be bombarded with interview requests, but because she's standing in solidarity with people who are losing their homes, she's only been contacted by two other reporters.

"If we're united, we're a better force. We need to stand together," she says. "I use my voice for the people. I know all of the councilmen and councilwomen in my area. I'm not afraid to speak and ask for better conditions for my community."

Botello found her voice 10 years ago after falling and hurting her knee on a routine walk home. Her South Central Los Angeles neighborhood was usually dark because the street lights rarely worked. "We usually had only one light that worked, so I went to local council meetings and raised my voice. Why are our streets dark? We need light. My neighborhood hasn't been dark since." She's been going strong ever since. If there's an action focusing on an issue she cares about, she will do whatever it takes to be there, even if it means rescheduling an overdue eye surgery. "I still have time and I want to keep going."

In addition to the Chase Bank action last month, several other grassroots actions failed to receive the attention they deserve. These actions, no matter how small, should not be discounted. Let's hope these voices and demands become too loud to ignore in 2011.

-- On December 9, thousands of inmates in Georgia state prisons began a six-day strike to call attention to their treatment and to demand basic human rights: a living wage for work, educational opportunities, decent living conditions and health care, and an end to cruel and unusual punishment. It was largest prison strike in U.S. history, but the New York Times was one of the few mainstream outlets to cover it.

“Perhaps there was a larger hand at play—one that did not want the deplorable conditions of the Georgia prison system to surface,” writes Death and Taxes’ Joe Weber.

For extensive coverage, analysis and interviews with inmates, you had to turn to independent outlets like Facing South and the Black Agenda Report. “They want to break up the unity we have here,” said an anonymous strike leader in an interview with the Black Agenda Report. “We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground.”

By refusing to work or leave their cells, the inmates brought attention to prison labor and the growing prison-industrial complex, two issues that rarely get covered in the national media. In These Times ran a piece about Georgia’s hidden prison labor force and The Irish Times ran a piece about what prison life is actually like in Georgia, which has the highest prisoner-to-resident ratio in the U.S. with 60,000 prisoners and 150,000 people on probation. According to the piece, African Americans comprise 63 percent of the prison population, but only 30 percent of state residents.

“Even though reports are stating that the strike is effectively over, the momentum created by the activities of these inmates cannot be understated,” writes Boyce Watkins, founder of the Your Black World Coalition. “By coming together in such an amazing way, the individuals in the Georgia State correctional system have made a strong statement for human rights around the world.”

-- On December 11, a few local media outlets in Waterville, Maine reported on an action organized by the Maine Fair Trade Campaign to call attention to President Obama's decision to bring the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement to Congress for a vote. The group, which opposes NAFTA and CAFTA, rang a bell 31 times in honor of the more than 31,000 Maine-based jobs that have been outsourced since 2000. "People all over the state have suffered because of this," said campaign board member Sarah Bigney in an interview with The Morning Sentinel. "We know what the impact of NAFTA has been. We must say no to this madness. We know it will continue to worsen the job crisis." According to the Economic Policy Institute, the deal will increase the deficit with Korea by $16.7 billion, and cost 159,000 U.S. jobs within the first seven years after it takes effect.

Public Citizen says it's up to Congress to make the "right decision and reject this deeply flawed, job-killing" deal, which is an expansion of the deals negotiated under the Bush administration. "As a Senator and then as a presidential candidate, President Obama opposed the deal,” says a statement on Public Citizen’s site. “He pledged to replace the damaging NAFTA model. In June 2010, President Obama said he would start renegotiating parts of the agreement in preparation for sending it to Congress. But he only focused on some modest changes to automobile trade issues. This came after over 100 members of Congress and over 500 unions, environmental, faith and other organizations called on him to meet his commitments and really fix Bush’s old text. The deal Obama is now pushing directly conflicts with his campaign commitments.”

Congress is expected to vote on the deal in February.

-- On December 15, workers, union activists, and community supporters took part in more than 40 actions at Rite Aid stores in 11 states to raise awareness about low wages and health insurance cost increases. In These Times, one of the only outlets to report on the National Day of Action, ran a piece by AFL-CIO campaign coordinator Rand Wilson. He writes that the actions were "sparked by a rash of poor decisions by Rite Aid officials across the country."

"In Lancaster, California, Rite Aid executives stalled talks with 500 warehouse employees for nearly two years. Now officials are proposing to gouge employees by 'marking-up' the cost of health insurance 28 times over the increases charged by insurers. In Rome, New York, Rite Aid is closing a distribution facility that pays family-sustaining wages and benefits and provides workers with a voice on the job. Work is being shifted to a nearby location that pays low wages with few benefits and no job rights."

Watch a video of the action in Oakland, California.

-- On December 16, 131 veterans and their supporters were arrested after chaining themselves to the White House fence during a snowstorm to demand an end to the ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. According to Veterans for Peace, it was the largest veteran-led demonstration in recent years, but just like Winter Soldier, the action was completely ignored by the corporate media. Dave Lindorff reports that it was blacked out of the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

"None of us expected that these illegal wars of aggression would immediately stop due to our simple action, but we did hope that we would send a message -- a message that there are citizens who do not support our government’s illegal wars and occupations; a message to the world that we are shamed by the actions of our government and we will do everything we can to stop it," writes veteran and peace activist Leah Bolger. "It is our sincere hope that this action will be a spark that ignites the consciousness of others; that our refusal to obey and willingness to put our liberty on the line will give them the courage of their own convictions and they will also begin to act in resistance as well."

In New York City, 75 veterans, members of Grandmothers Against the War, including two in their 90s, the Green Party, and other groups stood in solidarity with the activists in DC. Eleven people were arrested for blocking an intersection near the military recruiting station in Times Square. Joan Wile, founder of Grandmothers Against the War, writes, "It is hoped that the New York protest along with the big one in Washington served as a wake-up call to the American people about the tragedy of this hopeless and destructive war. Wake up, America!"

At another solidarity action in San Francisco, 26 people were arrested for taking part in a die-in and blocking the doors of the Federal Building.

-- On December 20, six people were arrested for trespassing after they locked arms and climbed the steps to the Bank of America entrance in Clayton, St. Louis. According to organizers, some 80 people gathered in front of the bank to raise awareness about a pending foreclosure facing Mary and Mike Boehm. Mary Boehm says after her husband lost his job in 2009, she applied for the mortgage modification program designed to keep people in their homes. On November 8, 2009, Bank of America told her she qualified, but she needed to turn in additional paperwork in order to be officially approved. Even though the Boehms never missed a payment, they received a notice in November 2010 saying they were in default. The foreclosure proceedings began on December 26. The action was organized by the grassroots group Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.

Watch KMOV's coverage here. A class action lawsuit has since been filed in St. Louis federal court against Bank of America for allegedly refusing to participate in foreclosure prevention programs despite taking $25 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program money, according to the Courthouse News Service.

Rose Aguilar is the host of Your Call, a daily call-in radio show on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and KUSP 88.9 FM in Santa Cruz, and author of Red Highways: A Liberal's Journey into the Heartland.

Capitalism, Market Fundamentalism, and the Duplicitous Meanings of Democracy

by Charles Sullivan / January 17th, 2011

Democracy is a word that is used too recklessly in western culture. Despite the prevalent belief that the meaning of democracy is universally understood, it remains an elusive idea that is not easily implemented. As a political philosophy, democracy is more closely associated with the socialist governments of Latin America, with Venezuela and Bolivia, than with the United States.

Webster’s Online Dictionary provides seven short definitions for democracy. The fourth definition is the one that comes closest to my own understanding of the term: “Government by the people; a form of government in which supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.” If one accepts Webster’s definition as a starting point for dialog about democracy, there are two main points that must figure prominently in the discussion: democracy is a concept that relates strictly to human beings and that working people, who constitute upwards of 95% of the citizenry, are disempowered and unrepresented.

Judging from these criteria it is apparent that the U.S. is neither a representative democracy nor a democratic republic. For instance, the people have no say in whether or not the nation goes to war. Nor do they have a voice in deciding economic policy. If they did, we would not have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. We would not be bankrupting the treasury to bail out a criminal banking industry, or to finance the privatization of the public domain. We would not bankroll a bloated military or the imperial wars it wages for the financial gain of defense contractors and corporate investors. Like other developed nations, we would have universal health care and publicly-subsidized higher education. Our tax dollars would provide social services rather than corporate welfare and tax cuts for the rich. There would be egalitarianism rather than neo-feudalism. People would matter more than profits.

Not only are our freedoms restricted; they are more illusory than real. We are permitted to choose between political candidates pre-selected for us by the elite. We have the freedom to choose where we will eat or shop or what kind of car we will drive. We have the freedom to migrate from one job to another, but we have no say in how the work is performed, how much it pays, or how the final product of our labor is marketed. We do not get to decide whether it will be bartered or sold. No matter where you go the workplace is a hierarchal dictatorship. The business owner does not care what you think. You are a replaceable cog in an heartless machine that is designed to profit the owner by exploiting the worker. This is the indisputable legacy of capitalism.

The U.S. political system is controlled by capital. Elections preserve the status quo rather than permit reform or complete political and social reorganization. It is corporate money, not people, that chooses who can compete for office and who will ultimately win. Americans are literally voting in the absence of choice. Most legislators sell themselves to the highest bidder. The electoral system perpetuates the illusion of democracy while actually promoting its opposite: plutocracy.

When the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people and that money is free speech, multinational corporations began outright purchasing legislators who would construct the legal framework for dismantling the social infrastructure in favor of an authoritarian corporate state. Capital replaced people in the political equation. This sleight of hand facilitated stocking the judiciary with corporate sycophants rather than justice-dispensing public servants.

By reifying corporations as omnipotent persons and by equating capital with free speech, the Supreme Court gave corporations and their CEOs enormous power. Since corporations do not have a pulse or a conscience, the courts essentially created sociopathic institutions that are driven by an insatiable lust for profit. Originally, corporations were moderately controlled by government through regulation. But as corporate influence in government waxed, corporations began to lobby for, and to win, greater deregulation. The revolving door between big business and government gave rise to the corporate state and to unfettered capitalism.

Corporate power expanded. Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets. Money triumphed over people. With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations that were ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy that is eroding civil liberties and killing the planet.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public. And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.

The perversion of democracy permitted non-persons — corporations — to have representation in government by shutting out actual persons. Prostituted by corporate money, politicians put profits above the needs of the people. Capital gained primacy over human beings, and the market was deified as an omniscient, divine oracle. Now it is regarded as a primal force of nature too powerful to be controlled by mortal men and women.

Owing to the perversion of language created by the elite, Webster’s definition of democracy must be revisited and reinterpreted. Corporations have replaced people in the formula and capital has become synonymous with free speech. Webster’s definition of democracy was altered to become “Government by the corporations; a form of government in which supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the corporations.” Now capitalism is God and human beings are its subordinates.

It is imperative that we comprehend how the perversion of language serves the agenda of the elite. For instance, when President Obama speaks about bringing democracy to the world through the power of militarization and colonization, he is not talking about democracy in the classic sense that Webster defined for us. Obama is merely substituting capitalism for democracy. Let us recall, however, that In Baghdad, as elsewhere in the world, McDonalds and Burger King were preceded by carpet bombs and tanks.

We must understand that capitalism and democracy are irreconcilably opposing philosophies. Just as two objects cannot occupy the same physical space at the same time, we can either have capitalism or democracy, but not both simultaneously. Markets either serve people or people serve markets. One has to be in control of the other, one has to be more powerful than the other.

Private ownership of the means of production and the invisible hand of the market are two key components of modern capitalism. In reality, there is no ‘invisible hand’ of the market, as the proponents of free market capitalism contend. If there were, the global banking system would have collapsed long ago. We have only to lift the cloak of secrecy for the human finger prints of manipulation to become plainly visible. A small cadre of the elite is manipulating everything.

Webster’s interpretation makes it clear that democracy can only be applied to people. To equate corporations with human beings and capital with free speech is a perversion of language that sets reality on its head. It is a thinly veiled attempt by impotent human beings to play god, to create a Frankenstein monster and unleash it upon the world and to worship it as an omniscient deity. This is the handiwork of egomaniacal jesters that must be rejected as the work of madmen.

If democracy were synonymous with capitalism, then the economic and social disparity between rich and poor, which is greater in the U.S. than anywhere on earth, would not exist. According to Thomas Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door, the top 1 percent of the population owns greater wealth than the bottom 90%. With the continued growth of corporate power and the adulation of free market capitalism, the gap will continue to widen.

If we permit the unpardonable sin of substituting corporations for human beings and continue to associate capitalism with democracy, we will sanction the continued evolution of a repressive corporate state with all of its Orwellian connotations. We will also seal the fate of working people to a life of servitude to the elite. This is clearly the direction we are headed.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy have particularly onerous ramifications for military personnel. Told that they are bringing democracy to the world, in reality our military is forcing capitalism upon people who have other ideas about social and economic theories of government. Those who believe they are protecting their country from external threats are actually fighting for the creation of a totalitarian corporate state run by the global elite. Generations of presidents and generals have pulled the wool over their eyes. But occasionally the truth comes out.

As used by the ruling class, ‘democracy’ and’ freedom’ are code words for capitalism and free markets. Do not be fooled by them. Making the world safe for corporate plunder does not pave the way for democracy. It opens the door to economic exploitation and subjugation.

In the 1930s, General Smedley Butler, a highly decorated four star general, wrote a treatise on militarism and capitalism called War is a Racket. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, warned us about an emerging military-industrial complex in his farewell address on January 17, 1961. Private Bradley Manning and Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, are warning us today, and they are paying a heavy price.

As his record attests, President Obama is an ardent believer in the corporate state and in free market fundamentalism. He makes no bones about it and never has. Like his predecessors, Obama is a disciple of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of Economics. It is only by viewing him in this context and through the lens of class consciousness that his actions make sense in a historical context. War and occupation can never be reconciled with the principles of democracy.

Obama is unabashedly representing his real constituency: the banking industry and the military industrial complex. In the purview of the elite, anyone who opposes these ideologies is an enemy of the state or a terrorist. They are pawns in another of America’s endless wars: the one that pits the working class against the ruling class.

Charles Sullivan is a naturalist and free-lance writer residing in the hinterlands of geopolitical West Virginia. Read other articles by Charles.

This article was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 7:02am and is filed under Capitalism, Corporate Globalization, Democracy, Disinformation, Military/Militarism, Obama.

The Tucson shootings

The Tucson shootings

The blame game

Politer politics would help America in many ways; but it needs sensible gun laws much more

Jan 13th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION

SARAH PALIN once urged her supporters not to retreat but to reload. In the run-up to last year’s mid-terms her website carried a map of vulnerable Democrat-held seats, each marked with the cross-hairs of a gun-sight. Sharron Angle, a Republican candidate in that election, once said that the federal government needed “second-amendment remedies”—the second being the one about the right to bear arms. Right-wing radio and television hosts routinely indulge in the language of armed resistance to the tyranny that resides in Washington, DC, as though Barack Obama were a reincarnation of the hated King George III and they were the heroes of the revolution.

None of this is useful or clever—and it is no less awful because the American left is also guilty of crass hyperbole. But it is a big (and so far unjustified) leap to blame the woeful state of American political discourse for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman, and the killing of six people in Tucson, Arizona, on January 8th (see article). Worse, by focusing on this issue, America is ignoring the real culprit: its gun laws.

It is clearly true that American politics have got a lot nastier in recent years. Politicians and their acolytes no longer treat opponents as decent and honourable, if sadly mistaken, public servants. Liberals blame talk radio and Fox News for this, but leftish websites have proved themselves more than capable of dishing out abuse, sometimes laced with violent imagery, to Mrs Palin, bankers and George Bush.

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• The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords: The tears of Tucson Jan 13th 2011

This development is to be deplored (though pious Britons might also note that their politicians cheerfully discussed “decapitation strategies” at the last election). Such talk certainly makes it harder for America’s two political parties to co-operate in tackling urgent questions such as their nation’s gargantuan debt, or its slide in the world education rankings. And, in the country with the developed world’s highest murder rate and easiest access to guns, violent political rhetoric that paints government as an enemy to be fought is troubling.

An uptick in death threats

The causal relationship between vicious talk and violent action is far less certain. Since the 1960s political violence in America has been mercifully rare. The last killing of a member of Congress came in 1978, and that was in Guyana. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was 30 years ago. Since then only the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 in a federal government building, has spilt blood on America’s political scene, though the election of Barack Obama has prompted death threats from the sort of person who does not believe that a black man is fit to be president, and the contested passage of health-care reform seems to have prompted an increase in death threats against representatives who voted for it.

Whether Jared Loughner was part of this trend is arguable. He was evidently politicised: he raved on the internet about the currency and the government. He had met Ms Giffords before and been offended by her failure to answer a nonsensical question he had put to her. The FBI found a note in his home about his “assassination”, saying “I planned ahead”. But unlike the killer of Salman Taseer, who said after he murdered the Pakistani politician last week that he was prompted by Mr Taseer’s opposition to the blasphemy law, Mr Loughner has not explained himself; and his decision to take the fifth amendment in court this week suggests he may stay silent.

Mr Loughner may be politically motivated, but he is also clearly insane—a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia in the view of a psychologist, and one who had already attracted police attention. He was ejected from an adult mathematics class because he had a habit of yelling that the class was unconstitutional and thought the government was trying to control his grammar. The indiscriminate carnage in Tucson looks more like the killings by a deranged student at Virginia Tech in 2007, or the schoolroom atrocity at Columbine in 1999, than the assassinations of the Kennedys or Martin Luther King.

And even if intemperate political language did to some degree help stew Mr Loughner’s brain—along with violent video games, Goth music and marijuana—there is nothing to be done about it. Rambunctious debate is central to America’s democracy. The first amendment protects free speech even more firmly than the second protects guns—the real villain of the piece, besides the killer himself.

The right target, ever further away

Opportunists who seek to gain political advantage by blaming the shootings on words would do America better service if they focused on bullets. In no other decent country could any civilian, let alone a deranged one, legally get his hands on a Glock semi-automatic. Even in America, the extended 31-shot magazine that Mr Loughner used was banned until 2004. As the Brady Centre, established after the Reagan shooting to commemorate one of its victims, has noted, more Americans were killed by guns in the 18 years between 1979 and 1997 than died in all of America’s foreign wars since its independence. Around 30,000 people a year are killed by one of the almost 300m guns in America—almost one for every citizen. Those deaths are not just murders and suicides: some are accidents, often involving children.

The tragedy is that gun control is moving in the wrong direction. The Clinton-era ban on assault weapons expired in 2004 and, to his discredit, Mr Obama has done nothing to try to revive it. In 2008 the Supreme Court struck down Washington, DC’s ban on handguns, and in 2010 Chicago’s went the same way; others are bound to follow. In state after state the direction of legislation is to remove restrictions on gun use (those footling bans on bringing weapons into classrooms or churches or bars), rather than to enhance them.

It is fanciful to imagine that guns will ever disappear from America; they are too deeply embedded in its founding myths and its culture. But that does not mean that more effective checks on the mentally unstable are impossible, or that restrictions on the killing power of what can be sold are doomed to failure. Neither of these will happen, though, unless the blame is directed to where it belongs.

from PRINT EDITION | Leaders

What Does WikiLeaks Have on Bank of America?

What Does WikiLeaks Have on Bank of America?

Thursday 13 January 2011

by: Mary Bottari | Campaign for America's Future | Report

(Photo: petekraynak; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is promising to unleash a cache of secret documents from the hard drive of a U.S. megabank executive. In 2009, he told Computer World that the bank was Bank of America (BofA). In 2010, he told Forbes that the information was significant enough to "take down a bank or two," but that he needed time to lay out the information in a more user-friendly format.

Recent new reports suggest that BofA is now moving into high gear on damage control, creating a "war room" and buying up hundreds of derogatory Internet domain names including BankofAmericaSucks.com and BrianMoynihanblows.com (BofA's CEO).

Before the big banks start calling for Assange's internment at Guantanamo, the question worth considering is what does Wikileaks have on America's largest bank?

Legal Liability for Toxic Mortgages

BofA is already under the gun, defending itself from multiple lawsuits from private investors as well as Fannie and Freddie demanding that the bank buy back billions worth of toxic mortgages-backed securities. The firm stopped issuing subprime mortgages in 2001, but it kept underwriting subprime mortgage-backed securities for many years. In September 2009, for example, BofA underwrote $239 million worth of securities backed by subprime loans. BofA has reserved $4.4 billion for these "put back" lawsuits. If Assange has emails showing that top executives at BofA knew they were peddling toxic dreck to investors, it would rock the firm and give tremendous ammunition to the army of lawyers already knocking on BofA's door.

Reckless and Illegal Foreclosures

BofA is at the heart of the robo-signing scandal and has wrongfully foreclosed on countless American families. One poor woman returned to a vacation home to find it locked, all her possessions gone -- including the ashes of her late husband. How could such a mistake be made? A BofA employee deposed in February 2010 said that she signed as many as 8,000 foreclosure documents a month without reviewing them, in violation of the law. Mounting questions about the fraudulent and illegal foreclosure practices at the big banks and mortgage service companies prompted BofA to temporarily halt foreclosures nationwide in October 2010. If Wikileaks can document that top BofA officials have a callous disregard for legal processes and constitutionally protected property rights, BofA's mounting legal liability may not be sustainable.

Countrywide Headaches

In 2008, BofA acquired Countrywide, one of the most aggressive and fraudulent lenders during the housing bubble. The result has been a trainwreck of liability and lawsuits for the megabank that now has over 1.3 million customers in foreclosure. To settle the lawsuits with Illinois, California and eight other states over predatory lending, BofA came up with an $8.4 billion loan relief plan for those holding Countrywide mortgages. In June, 2010 BofA paid $108 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission case that charged Countrywide with having extracted excessive fees out of borrowers facing foreclosure. BofA paid $600 million in August 2010 to settle shareholder claims that Countrywide had concealed the riskiness of its lending standards. There is no end in sight for these suits. In June 2010 the State of Illinois sued Countrywide again, this time over racial discrimination in its lending practices. Wikileaks could have further documentation of Countrywide's illegal and reckless underwriting practices or ongoing fraud at BofA.

Taxpayer Paid Bonuses

BofA acquired the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch for $50 billion in January 2009. The U.S. government blessed the merger with a $20 billion bailout loan to aid BofA. After the acquisition went through, it was revealed that Merrill Lynch had lost $15.8 billion in the last quarter of 2008 and that $3.6 billion in bonuses were paid ahead of schedule to top executives at Merrill. Among beneficiaries of the bonus bonanza was Merrill's CEO John Thain, who famously spent a million redecorating his office at the height of the crisis. About the deal New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said: "One disturbing question that must be answered is whether Merrill Lynch and Bank of America timed the bonuses in such a way as to force taxpayers to pay for them through the deal funding." If Wikileaks has emails showing top executives knowingly used bailout bucks for bonuses, this ugly chapter in history could be reopened, prompting Congressional investigations and further bailout backlash.

Still Too Big To Fail

In addition to the $25 billion in TARP bailout money and the $20 billion for purchasing Merrill, America recently learned of the extraordinary actions taken by the Federal Reserve to prop up BofA at the height of the crisis, details that were kept secret from the public. When the Fed was forced to release data about its emergency loan programs in December 2010, we found that BofA tapped an estimated $931 billion from the Fed in short term loans and government subsidies. If Wikileaks has information showing that America's biggest bank is only being kept alive by accounting tricks and ongoing government subsidies, the result could be another government bailout. Or is it possible we might see the first orderly dissolution of a of a "too big to fail" under the new Wall Street reform law?

"We Don't Suck"

BofA doesn't just want you to know that their CEO Brian Moynihan doesn't suck, they want you to know that their top staff does not suck either. The bank has started buying damaging domain names for a long list of executives, prompting many to wonder: just what have those executives been up to over there at BofA?

Hopefully Wikileaks and Julian Assange will soon let us know.

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