The serial crimes of the school privatizers and their corporate sponsors
Written by Danny Weil | dailycensored.com
You can’t make this stuff up!
For all readers: A bit of news from the decks of the Titanic. The activities follow the criminal threat and assault pattern emerging in the zero-tolerance atmosphere of American culture. One involves Detroit teachers; the other involves students.
I have attempted to view the serial crimes of the school privatizers and their corporate sponsors in detail, for analysis must be applied. A clear understanding of the state of the dis-union is crucial. Like serial killers, the methodical and regimented psyches of the privatizers and their witting or unwitting followers and supplicants show vivid patterns. This is what any thought-detective is looking for and this includes those of us on the predator hunt for multiple offenders.
Have no doubt about it; the criminalization of childhood coupled with the assault and threats of arrest of teachers is a knowable pattern throughout capitalist history. The viciousness of the assaults now lies only in the advancement of the technological means of production and their use. The social relations of production remain the same — a few corporations and their rich shareholders own the means of production, be it education, prisons, airlines, car factories E-Bay, Wal-Mart, education or the like. Power and authority amongst the elite leisure class will not lessen until the actions of real people, who by far outnumber the ranks of Wall Street, come together and unshackle the chains of racism, sexism, homophobia, classicism and other vestiges of division and divide and conquer strategies by the ruling class. When we unite, they lose. Every time. Go check it out, read Howard Zinn’s work on people’s history.
More on Robert Bobb, Keith Johnson and the Detroit Federation of Teachers
You might remember the article I penned for www. dailycensored.com, regarding the plight of students and teachers in Detroit. Our journey led us up the pant leg of Robert Bobb the Financial Administrator for Detroit schools and an inept fixer. It also allowed us to hunt down Keith Johnson, the corrupt Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) union president who was slated to be ousted on February 11, 2010 with 1,300 petitions gathered and signed by teachers. But it didn’t happen this way, as I reported. But what I did not report or perhaps slightly indicated, were the threats by Keith Johnson to use the police to intimidate his own union and thus Detroit teachers and their allies.
As reported, at the last two union meetings, the most recent on Feb. 11, 2010 Johnson refused to allow for the recall vote.
As the Metro Times, online reported: “Keith Johnson, attempting to stomp out an effort to recall him, hasn’t been able to keep his membership under control, despite the use of both private security guards and Detroit cops” (MetroTimes http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14810).
That’s right, Keith Johnson has private guards and taxpayer paid police to aid and abet his corruption and he is not at all afraid to call them out.
Two teachers gathered about 1,300 signatures from the DFT’s 7,000 members and submitted the recall petition on February 11th. They say they met the requirement for the number of signatures and the number of schools represented to hold a recall vote. But Johnson and the executive committee claimed the charges as stated in the petition were “vague” and disallowed the petition, calling it “invalid.” Forget the people; Johnson has bigger plans with Robert Bobb to bring the Wal-Mart and Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top to Detroit and to do this they must break the union.
Following the failure to ratify the recall, Johnson’s opponents prevented the meeting from going forward. But what is interesting is that Keith Johnson, union boss of the DFT, called the police and security guards before each meeting was to take place, Why? Simple to act as Pinkerton agents and thus to stand up for law and order, which means the hierarchical predatory law and order of the Hobbsian worlds of both Johnson and Bobb.
According to the MetroTimes online from the combat zone of Detroit: “We can tell you with certainty this much: Things are getting really ugly inside the New Center headquarters, and besieged union president Keith Johnson, attempting to stomp out an effort to recall him, hasn’t been able to keep his membership under control, despite the use of both private security guards and Detroit cops” (ibid).
But that is not the half of it. The MetroTimes revealed that at both meetings, the first held in January to schedule the recall and the February 11th meeting to actually conduct the vote: “Both months, Johnson has called Detroit police, though no arrests have been made, and the union’s privately contracted security staff has escorted his opponents from the meeting” (ibid).
Why? To intimidate and threaten teachers, students, the community and their supporters. Johnson works like a small dictator in a banana republic. Fear is his modus operandi. Are they spying on teachers now? Following them to see where they go? Using the Patriot Act to shred their civil rights? We don’t know, but it would be revealing if a lawsuit was filed and the phase of discovery let us know.
The Metro Times noted: “At the January meeting, a teacher who left the meeting asked the security guard, “Why did you threaten (teacher) Heather Miller that you would fuck her up?” The guard replied, “I’ll say whatever the fuck I want.” (ibid).
This is what is known as class war and it is getting dirtier and dirtier each day in Detroit as the city falls. The thugs employed are not just intimidating they can and will be vicious. Although no one was arrested, teachers left the meeting yelling, “Recall, recall”, so it seems Donna Stearn from By Any Means Necessary (http://www.bamn.com/) was right when I quote her in my article on Detroit schools. Johnson is going to have a tough time steering this ship and Bobb might be heading for the recycle bin.
But the real purpose of this bit of news is to show the extent to which the ruling elite and their paid thugs will go in their attempt to intimidate working people in the name of the “union”. Keith Johnson’s got to go, he is wasting valuable time and money to threaten democracy with brutality and he can never be trusted nor ever regain confidence. This will spell big trouble for Robert Bobb who counted on the sycophantic Johnson to carry his water behind the backs of the union. Sorry, Bobb, perhaps you should go back to the Broad Academy for some more power point presentations.
The Metro said, about the February 11th meeting: “Teachers continued to leave. One man compared the election committee to a corrupt dictatorship for what he said was a miscount of votes about the agenda. “It’s sickening,” he muttered as he left” (ibid).
We now leave the broken industrial city of Detroit and visit Susan Ohanian, who always has some important and captivating news to report. Susan hunts education predators like I do and if you have not been to her site you should go. It is http://susanohanian.org. Susan is an educational author and writer and she finds news throughout the nation the national and local corporate media fail to report, even though the news puts the National Inquirer to shame. Take this shocking bit of reporting out of Philadelphia.
According to the Associated Press of 2/`0/2010: “A suburban Philadelphia school district used the webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit” (http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=9160).”
Yes, that’s right, the Patriot Act is not limited to adults and No Child Left Behind doesn’t mean ‘no clues left behind’. The AP reported that students are now taking to taping their computers to prevent spying on them.
The school district can activate the webcams without students’ knowledge or permission, the suit claimed. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 2010-02-19 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_667913.html).
Ah, Leave No Child Left Behind, so they say, and of course this imbecilic decision on the part of some authoritarians employed by a senseless institution shows that gravity of the violence, spying and otherwise invasion of privacy by the authoritarians that will never “leave children out of sight”, let alone behind. The decision should also ironically helps with the resistance efforts to reach across zoning lines and help suburbs to organize with urban districts. Suburbs, for so long thought of as outside the periphery of fear, suspicion and police tactics, are now themselves the victim of the spiraling police state.
“(Matsko) cited as evidence (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 2010-02-19 http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_667913.html).
The report went on noting: “This isn’t just them spying on the kids, this is them intruding on the parents’ home. Who knows what they are seeing?” Walczak said. “The courts for 80 years have said there’s no greater sanctuary than a person’s own home.”
It brings up the question: why is and was the school engaged in such activity? One can only suspect at this point that it is either for commercial marketing purposes (perhaps to gather data on student consumptive habits), or is a part of a wider police intrusion into the daily lives of the American people, or both. Either way, the zero-tolerance policy doesn’t end at the end of the school day, that’s for sure. When the sun goes down it enters into the Twilight Zone of late stage capitalism.
Son of No Child Left Behind lurking in the shadows
Finally, Senior House Republicans and Democrats plan to announce this Thursday that they will team up to rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law. The millionaire’s club will now “work together”, as they have been doing so nicely in the health care debacle, to no doubt launch a new assault on students, communities, parents and working people with their plans to rewrite what should have been a repealed law. Obama didn’t have the guts to repeal the law but instead did the contrary; he selected Arne Duncan to institutionalize it with Race to the Top. Well, now the Senate, who reads little if anything other than numerical amounts on the greenbacks they receive or their quarterly Wall Street statements, will begin to further erode education.
As reported in the Washington Post:
“Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.), Dale E. Kildee (D-Mich.), John Kline (R-Minn.) and Michael N. Castle (R-Del.) pledged “a bipartisan, open and transparent effort to rewrite No Child Left Behind — a law that we all agree is in need of major reform. It will start with a series of hearings in the coming weeks to explore the challenges and opportunities ahead as we work to ensure an excellent education is available to every student in America.”
“Miller is chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Kline is the ranking Republican, and Kildee and Castle are senior members. Miller said that forces are aligning this year for significant school reform. He said the administration’s $4 billion Race to the Top competition for states has opened a national conversation about how to improve teaching and learning through better use of data on student performance.”
“This is the best opportunity we have had to have really substantial change in how we meet the educational needs of our kids,” Miller said in an interview. “Congress would love to go home and say, ‘We fixed No Child Left Behind.’ “(Nick Anderson Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 18, 2010 February 18, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/17/AR2010021705195.html)
The Obama administration is its budget proposed eliminating the standard of “adequate yearly progress” for schools to close test-score achievement gaps, a key element of the law. Good move, but will it happen? Not if Arne Duncan can close enough schools fast enough. The Obama administration has shown us that corporatizing and privatizing education while closing public schools and throwing students to the streets or forcing them to transfer to charter schools and privatized schools, is the plan. As for the bi-partisanship; it will ooze into bi-courtesanship as the educational lobbyists will be on hand to assure that the ‘fix is in’ for education as well as it is for health care. Kill the public option, close more public schools.
So there we have it in one week: FBI giving classes to 4th graders, Wal-Mart “interning” with 4 Detroit HS, corruption and nepotism in Detroit, police and private security threaten teacher activism and freedom of assembly, a 12 year old student arrested for doodling in school and webcams fitted with ‘spy cameras’ to spy on students and their home life. Welcome to the America. “Watcha gonna do when they come for you”?
