Little Scream – The Heron & The Fox
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1980s, and I thought a lot about imperialism. The truth is that I wanted to get out of the country, and I didn’t want to join the military, and I was too poor to be able to afford travel. In one sense it was selfish, but in another sense it created an opportunity for me to cross borders that would have ordinarily been barriers. That seemed like a good thing.
I think imperialism works through ignorance as well as power. As a volunteer, I might not change the world– or the Philippines where I worked– but I might be able, simply by going, to embody a more complex view of my culture, if not my country, to a people who I knew had every reason to mistrust both. I still think that this is true and that programs like the Peace Corps do more good than harm.
I also learned that cultural domination was a very slippery thing. The U.S. has done horrible things in the Philippines; it’s probably doing horrible things there now, especially in the Muslim south. The Filipinos, though, are people, and like all people they are more complex than we often give them credit for. American culture does have a heavy hand, but the Filipinos are by no means passive vessels.
Filipinos transform American power in ways that are both dramatic and very subtle. I was thinking about this today, both because this month marks the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, but also because I find myself in a similar position now, in that I work in an industry, for-profit higher education, that to some seems as dubious as the Peace Corps seemed to many of my friends 25 years ago.
“The Fear and Frustration of Faculty at For-Profit Colleges,” is a dramatic, if perhaps exaggerated, example of the suspicion many feel. This argument bothers me, first, because it suggests that the not-for profit sector has some sort of moral high ground, as if it had somehow escaped the corruptions of education under capitalism. Just a moments research illustrates that this is not true.
These critiques too often treat students in the same fashion that many critics of imperialism treat Filipinos: as passive victims. I want to a public school– the University of Texas at Austin– that made me pay tuition to teach, as a part of my graduate program, creating a debt that I have yet to repay. This school made all sorts of promises about full-time, tenured teaching positions, that were not true.
Maybe it was stupid of me to believe the pitch, but they are the same arguments being made now in colleges across the country, in for and not for profit schools alike. U.T.’s solid academic reputation, to my dismay, was of little help. I had to find my way without much guidance, but I wasn’t a victim. I would like to see lots of things change in my industry, but I think my students are more than victims too.
Hidden in Plain Sight
It’s a bleak Labor Day in every sense. The economy’s in a mess, and our so-called Democratic president has prepared us for his big speech on jobs– no doubt it’ll be a catalog of concessions to capital– by abandoning updates to the EPA. More and more, Obama just seems like another in a long line of liberal cowards too ready to believe the ever-present whining of the rich. “No we can’t!” “No we can’t!”
Of course they can. Obama chose to ignore all the wealth squirreled away, and the potential for green technology to jump-start the economy, and the (obvious) popularity of investing in clean water and air and better health and preventing disease. I think that future historians (are you listening?) should name our particular slice of time, the “hidden in plain sight” era.
As Robert Reich has pointed out, we know what the economy needs, from historical evidence– what we did the last time there was an economic crisis of this size– and from contemporary evidence, particularly from Germany (“Why Inequality is the Real Cause of Our Ongoing Terrible Economy“). He sums up the evidence here:
Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread. While Americans’ average hourly pay has risen only 6 percent since 1985, adjusted for inflation, German workers’ pay has risen almost 30 percent. At the same time, the top 1 percent of German households now take home about 11 percent of all income — about the same as in 1970. And although in the last months Germany has been hit by the debt crisis of its neighbors, its unemployment is still below where it was when the financial crisis started in 2007.
How has Germany done it? Mainly by focusing like a laser on education (German math scores continue to extend their lead over American), and by maintaining strong labor unions.
There’s no real mystery. Too many people in the U.S. were sold a bill of goods and came to believe that the very institutions necessary to maintaining a healthy economy and preventing disaster– measures that ought to be the basis of fiscal conservatism— had to be dismantled or rendered powerless. Roads, bridges, unions, schools: nothing’s worth the investment, government is the problem.
It’s not hard to imagine why a capitalist system resists anything that might restrict profits. It’s basic premise is greed. It is much harder to imagine why anyone who’s not rich would buy into the idea of unrestricted profits and power. History shows that dismantling labor unions is not much different from giving someone permission to withdraw as much as they like from your bank account.
Maybe that’s too abstract, somehow. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Americans like to believe that they can achieve whatever they like individually despite or perhaps because of their collective powerlessness. That’s the essence of right-wing libertarianism and the Tea Party (and the status system in academia) . That’s not economics, that’s Mad Max. Yet there’s also very concrete evidence too.
Americans are nothing if not sentimental about children, so you would think that anything that hurts their kids would cause an uprising. Yet according to data gathered by the New York Federal Reserve (“Chart of the Day: Student Loans Have Grown 511% Since 1999“) student debt rose by more than 500% during the Bush presidency. It’s hidden in plain sight; so is one good solution.
John Hiatt “Damn This Town”