PJ Harvey & John Parish – Is That All There Is
The Bloom’s Already Off the Rose
Despite rising unemployment and a cratering economy, the GOP has placed a hold on the nomination of President Obama’s choice for Secretary of Labor, the pro-worker Hilda Solis. The issue at stake is the Employee Free Choice Act, which aims to give workers a level playing field by allowing workers to choose a majority sign-up approach, dubbed “card check” by anti-union flacks, for selecting a union — rather than keeping that option in the hands of employers.
But the original Wagner Act in the 1930s gave workers the right to use a majority sign-up process if they so choose, rather than the current election system that allows widespread intimidation by employers.
Studies of hundreds of organizing campaigns have found that a fifth of all pro-union activists are fired during a campaign, half of all employers threaten to shut down their plant and roughly 80% of employers hire unionbusting consultants. Employers are still free under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act to hold intimidating one-on-one “sweat” sessions to legally discourage workers from joining a union. And, as I found out while going undercover to a unionbusting seminar, it’s equally legal for employers to just lie about the dire consequences facing workers if they join a union, from closed plants to somehow losing seniority and benefits. That’s the system the Employee Free Choice Act was designed to reform, by increasing penalties for corporate lawbreaking, allowing employees to choose the majority sign-up approach but still retaining the employees’ rights to hold a secret-ballot NLRB election if they want.
Art Levine, Posted January 24, 2009
The inauguration of President Obama was breathtaking, there’s no doubt about it. We’ve done something unprescedented in the developed world– elected a member of a historically oppressed minority as president. President Morales, of course, who’s Indian, was elected a few years ago in Bolivia. Still, this is one of those turning points that happen only once in a lifetime.
On the other hand, unlike President Morales, President Obama may not be fully what at least some expected. He’s begun the process of shutting down the base at Guantanamo, for example, and the so-called secret CIA bases, but he wants the military to use an interrogation standard that may be just as bad as the old policy, which endorsed torture. His economic team, too, includes people who’ve demonstrated a freakish love of the market.
And Noam Chomsky, among others, can’t see much difference yet between Obama’s position and the Bush position in Gaza. All this seems very healthy to me. As Naomi Klein says, “free your base, and the rest will follow.” That’s why we need the Employee Free Choice Act. But we should give credit where credit is due– the Bush family planning policy had to end– but if progressive people don’t push back, nothing good will come of all of this.
Writing Instruction in the Age of Digital Reproduction
CAN COMPUTERS TEACH CHILDREN TO write better? Michael Jenkins,who teaches language arts at Estancia Middle School in central New Mexico, tells the story of Maria (a pseudonym), who so struggled to put her ideas on paper that she used to cry whenever he gave the class a writing assignment. That was before Jenkins began using writing-instruction software that provides feedback on students’ essays and offers suggestions on how to improve them, all within seconds. By the end of the school year, Maria had more confidence in her writing abilities—and passed the writing portion of the state assessment test. “It’s not a cure-all, but what a difference it’s made in what the kids have shown they can do,” says Jenkins, who began using the software last year.
Greg Miller, www.sciencemag.org, January 19, 2009
Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, famously argued that mechanical reproduction fundamentally changed the work of art by transforming our sense of originality. The unique, singular object, with its “aura of originality” was superseded by the “transitoriness” of infinite reproducibility. The painting is replaced by photography and the film.
You see the very same tension in the emergence of software designed to asses student writing, a fear that the machine will strip out the individuality, the unique aura of individual expressiveness that was supposedly the goal of composition instruction. Benjamin argued, I think, that there was no going back; you can’t unscramble the egg.
Who’d want a culture without film and photography anyway? And painting has survived just fine. That might be a good way to think about this software too. It can assist students in those aspects of writing, most associated with our shared ethos of written communication. It can help much less with those ineffable qualities of writing that mark individual style.
The real question is economic and political, as Benjamin suggested. Will we be willing to invest our time and money, in other words, both individually and socially, in this complex set of tensions and desires, sharp concision and sloppy art, both irreconcilable and both necessary? Or will we use the machine to make excuses for denaturing education.
More Nurses, Less Bankers
What if we could end the healthcare crisis dogging our nation—and grow 2.6 million jobs at the same time?
The good news is we can do exactly that. If America summons the courage, and the will, to resolve our healthcare crisis, we can provide our national economy with a genuine and long-term stimulus, and continue moving towards the kind of sustainable development with quality jobs that our nation desperately needs.
A new study with eye popping numbers released by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy (IHSP) January 13 uncovers the details. You can read it at www.calnurses.org.
Moving to a guaranteed healthcare system would provide a major stimulus for the U.S. economy by creating 2.6 million new jobs– the same number lost in 2008 alone — and infuse $317 billion in business and public revenues, and another $100 billion in wages into the U.S. economy.
Single Payer Promotes Economic Recovery as Well as Solving the Healthcare Nightmare -Deborah Burger, R.N.California Progress Report, January 15, 2009.
Here’s a number that should freak out every U.S. Citizen: A single payer plan insuring that everyone has health care (in this case, the so-called Medicare for All proposal) would cost around 60 billion dollars. That means that we could have this program in place simply by cutting the recently released financial bailout money from 300 billion or so to, say, 200 billion.
What”s more, according to the nurses, the multiplier effects would create millions of new jobs. This is a conservative estimate, too. Imagine, for example, an economy in which small business can be started and run without the expense of health insurance. Imagine the reduced cost of U.S. cars if the automakers no longer had to pay for the health care for their workers.
The cost savings of a single payer plan are just as remarkable. Publicly administered health care programs have lower administration costs, for example, and they can bargain on a large scale for commonly prescribed drugs. The real limiting factor is simply an outdated conservative ideology unwilling to challenge the health care industry and afraid of big-government.