“Stand by Me” – Andy, Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora & Friends
The Big Lie Nears Climax: E.F.C.A.
America’s unionized private workforce has declined by approximately 27 percent since 1958. This, according to McMahon, has been a sign that unions have failed to respond to workers and market forces.
“(Small businesses) have to be nimble and flexible in their costs,” McMahon said. “Labor unions have not figured out a way to deal with that.”
He added that this reduction has led to a retirement and pension crisis for labor organizations.
“If you understand the Social Security problem, then you understand their problem,” McMahon said.
Union rep: card check vote imminent, BRUCE SIWY, Daily American Staff Writer
When I spend a little time looking around for relatively reasonable criticism of the Employee Free Choice Act, I have a hard time finding anything of substance. This piece, from a small paper in Pennsylvania, at least tries to set out somethi8ng resembling a debate. The E.F.C.A. is both so important and so simple, though, that critics can’t quite get a handle on it.
I certainly don’t meant to imply that the right’s rhetoric is based in an ideal of informed debate! But on certain issues like the current climate change bill they do at least make some effort at argument. I’d say that their arguments fall apart on closer examination, but at least they go through the motions.
E.F.C.A., however, generates the same cynicism and manipulation that surround the debates over terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein has nukes that can hit the U.S. in 45 minutes; the terrorists have a plan to kill thousands of people tomorrow and only by torturing them can be stop the plot; E.F.C.A. is the end of the world as we know it.
Reading the Right: The Dean’s List
As blog readers know by now, ACTA has just launched a campaign to highlight some of the impressive strides that many institutions have made in advancing intellectual diversity and academic freedom in recent years. One such campus was South Dakota State University. Between 2005 and 2008, the South Dakota Board of Regents enacted a number of reforms pertaining to intellectual diversity, including the requirement that a “Freedom in Learning” statement appear on every course syllabus at all of the system’s campuses. The statement adopted by the South Dakota State Administration informed students of their right to be graded solely on academic merits, and also told them that if they “believe that an academic evaluation reflects prejudiced or capricious standards,” they may contact the department head or college dean.
ACTA’s Must-Reads, Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on June 25, 2009
The interesting thing about the American Right Wing is that they seem to have read Orwell and decided that the “war is peace” strategy was in fact a great strategy. If you just keep repeating something, even if it’s diametrically opposed to anything resembling truth, much less common sense, it takes on a certain veracity. Drink the kool-aide often enough and you can’t tell the difference.
That’s what seemed to happen with the ACTA and ‘diversity.’ (Not that they are much different than other ‘center-right’ groups.) They almost always sided with the Bush administration’s attempts to purge college campuses of dissent; this was done under the name of “diversity,” of course. Now that the Shrub is gone, they are on the lookout for other ways to muzzle thinking.
And, once again, they want to encourage diversity by creating conditions that make it as unlikely as possible. Anyone who’s taught American students knows that their complaints about their professors are a tangled mess at best and almost impossible to interpret. Cyncial– or just practical– professors know all the tricks for getting good evaluations.
Groups like ACTA, though, know that promoting student rights and especially student evaluations of professors, can have a powerful chilling effect on academic debate, especially among non-tenured professors. In part that’s becuase the easiest, maybe the only way, to get tenure (a relatively rare thing now) is to play it as safe as possible.
If you are an adjunct, and the majority of college teachers are adjuncts, these evaluations can cost you your job. A contracting economy only sharpens the effect. So this is how you read “diversity” in these right wing contexts. It’s mostly a discussion of management, that is, of keeping the range of discussion as narrow as possible.
There’s a lot to avoid. Every once in a while, though, we get a few peaks behind the great and mighty OZ’s curtains. Here in Illinois, for example, there’s been a little storm cloud of trouble as it’s emerged that powerful people can gain admission to the University of Illinois, even if they are not qualified. I wonder if the ACTA will denounce this practice, too.