Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is demanding cutbacks and concessions, but teachers are pushing back amid a wider attack on public-sector unions. Lee Sustar reports.
Source: Chicago teachers vs. Rahm: Round two | SocialistWorker.org
Curated Links
How Capital Puts Creativity to Work
Carl Magnes writes in Jacobin:
The rapid growth of mega-festivals is a physical expression of the increasingly aggressive class barriers and inequities that fracture the social economy of art and music. They offer only a few strictly defined identities. You can be a member of the creative elite; an owner of capital; hired staff; or a member of the policed, regulated audience. The fences, hierarchy of privileges, and security guards are a live theater version of our cultural life’s stratification.
Read More: Money Before Music | Jacobin
Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Baltimore
Historian and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore claims that the rebellion in Baltimore is an uprising against austerity. She says that gentrified cities, the fall of manufacturing and the filling of jails with black men all fueled the reaction to the killing of Freddie Gray.
The US is more segregated by race and income now than in 1960.
A View of Sanders’ Campaign from the Left
Bhaskar Sunkara says we should welcome Bernie Sanders’ presidential run, while being aware of its limits.
Sanders’s candidacy doesn’t have to channel left forces into what will likely be a Clinton nomination. Instead, it could be a way for socialists to regroup, organize together, and articulate the kind of politics that speaks to the needs and aspirations of the vast majority of people. And it could begin to legitimate the word “socialist,” and spark a conversation around it, even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.
Read the Essay: Bernie for President? | Jacobin
A Conversation With Chomsky
Isabelle Kumar of Euronews interviews Noam Chomsky on a range of topics. On the subject of Greece’s debt (and that of Portugal and Spain and others) this is what he said.
Who incurred this debt? And who is the debt owed to? In part, the debt was incurred by dictators. So in Greece it was the fascist dictatorship, which the US supported, that incurred a large part of the debt. The debt I think was more brutal than the dictatorship, and that’s what’s called in international law, “odious debt” which need not be paid, and that’s a principal introduced into international law by the United States, when it was in their interest to do so. Much of the rest of the debt, what is called payments to Greece are in fact payments to banks, German and French banks, which had decided to make extremely risky loans with not very high interest and are now being faced with the fact that they can’t be paid back.
Read the Transcript: Chomsky says US is world’s biggest terrorist | euronews, the global conversation
Here’s the video.
The White Response to Baltimore
It’s in the defense of that property – those CVS stores owned by faceless individuals and those police cars being bashed in – that we’ve seen the strongest response from the dominant element of society. Social media is a good indication, but certainly not the only one. There, on sites like Facebook and Twitter, folks have spoken up about Freddie Gray for the first time. They’ve not come to the defense of the oppressed. Rather, they’ve spoken up in condemnation of those “animals,” “thugs,” and “criminals” who are “destroying their own city.” It’s some combination of historical illiteracy and racial animus that drives the response.
Read More: The Dominant White Response to Baltimore Shows Why Black Residents are Justified in their Anger
Dispatch from Baltimore
Stacia L. Brown reports for The Nation that the emotional distance between Freddie Gray’s moving funeral and the chaos that followed isn’t as wide as it may seem.
Billy Murphy had, at one point, asked everyone present to raise their hands if they’d been a victim of police brutality in Baltimore.
Everyone raised a hand.
Read More: Dispatch from Baltimore: Praying for Peace, Living Another Reality | The Nation
Baltimore Uprising
Here are a few links that seem relevant to the current drama playing out in the streets of Baltimore.
The city has paid about $5.7 million since 2011 over lawsuits claiming that police officers brazenly beat up alleged suspects. One hidden cost: The perception that officers are violent can poison the relationship between residents and police.
Source: Undue force – Sun Investigates – The Baltimore Sun
When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.
Source: As Riots Follow Freddie Gray’s Death in Baltimore, Calls for Calm Ring Hollow – The Atlantic
We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.
Source: Orioles COO John Angelos offers eye-opening perspective on Baltimore protests | For The Win
Most of the media sensationalized the small amount of property damage that took place during demonstrations last weekend–while downplaying all evidence of the systemic racism and police violence that stirred this reaction.
Source: We have a right to be in the streets for Freddie | SocialistWorker.org
Twenty journalists and 40 police, academics, youth and experts came together in Chicago at Columbia College Chicago to discuss how to better cover stories of race, police and community.
How Common Core Tests Affect First Graders
Over the years, we have had to move away from what we know is right for kids to what we are told we must do in order to prepare students for the tests.
Read More: First Grade Teacher: How Common Core Tests Affect My Students | Diane Ravitch’s blog
Don’t Say Drone
President Obama has chosen to operate his drone war in such unprecedented, absurd and arguably illegal secrecy that even in a rare burst of compelled transparency yesterday, neither he nor his press secretary could actually bring themselves to say the word “drone.”
Read More: The Word That Cannot Be Uttered (It’s Drones) – The Intercept