In These Times

New York isn't the only city that never sleeps. Across America, many educators spend restless nights wondering how to revive urban school systems. We meet some of them in City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row (The New Press, August), the much-anticipated companion to City Kids, City Teachers (1996). Central themes in the new book include the link between poverty and the achievement gap, and -- unsurprisingly -- teachers' struggles against the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Readers will also learn some education theory, as well as useful information about employment disparities between people of color and whites, budget cuts, and other problems facing the U.S. education system -- and what people are doing about them. But City Kids, City Schools -- edited by William Ayers, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Gregory Michie and Pedro A. Noguera -- is not a dry academic text to be consulted by masters' students trolling for a thesis topic. It's peppier than that. Contributors use a variety of genres -- including poetry and fiction -- to pull together a collection of inspiring tales. One essay from renowned education reformer Jonathan Kozol examines espresso-sipping parents who doubt that increasing funding to failing schools…

The Republican Party, which has defined modern-day negative politics, was back at it again this week, bashing Barack Obama and the news media in an ugly display that rivaled the old days of Nixon-Agnew – or George W. Bush's last convention where GOP operatives passed out "Purple Heart Band-Aids" to mock John Kerry's war wounds. After a slow start because of Hurricane Gustav, the convention in St. Paul, Minn., has turned into an anti-Obama hate-fest with a nearly all-white gathering laughing at and mocking the nation's first African-American presidential nominee of a major party. However, beyond the pulsating contempt visible on the faces of the GOP delegates, many of the nasty attacks on Obama – as well as the effusive praise for the Republican ticket – were blatantly false, as if testing the depths of American gullibility and bigotry. In speech after speech, Republicans didn't so much as tell the Big Lie as they deployed Wholesale Lies. The Associated Press, which mostly had been recycling the Republican spin about the supposedly "maverick" ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin, was so struck by the litany of distortions that it produced a special fact-checking article describing how Republicans had "stretched the…

You have to admire the Republican chutzpah. Still confronting a national scandal about packing the Justice Department with "loyal Bushies," they pick a vice presidential candidate who – in her two executive jobs in Alaska – ousted top law-enforcement officials because they were insufficiently loyal or not malleable enough One of those firings has put Gov. Sarah Palin at the center of an ongoing legislative investigation that presumably will require her to testify about whether she was behind efforts by her husband and senior staff to pressure the state's public safety commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law from the state troopers. When the commissioner, former Anchorage police chief Walter Monegan, refused to go along, he was summarily ousted by Palin without much explanation. Unless the Republicans can figure out a way to block Palin's sworn deposition, she will have to either admit that she used her political influence to wage a family vendetta or she must face the risk that her continued denials of involvement will be contradicted by her own staff or by some other evidence. However, if Palin admits that she did use her government office to punish a personal enemy – or that she fired the public safety…

I can't quite follow the offscreen sound bites preceding the main title of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's new documentary, Trouble the Water. But from the media voices I can transcribe, it's clear they succinctly present the film's agenda. At the same time, we see the inter-title "September 14th 2005/Central Louisiana" appear onscreen and get the first glimpse of the people who'll become the documentary's central characters, seated around a picnic table. Two of the offscreen voices come from President Bush. The others come from newscasters or interviewees: 1. "About 300,000 people displaced by Katrina have been scattered to at least a dozen states." 2. "Surviving Katrina was one thing; now people are just trying to survive the aftermath." 3. "[inaudible] ... evacuees were rolling in ... ." 4. "It's been called the largest migration in the country since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s." 5. Bush: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." 6. "For years officials have warned that the levees could break." 7. "I don't believe for one minute that anybody allowed people to suffer because they were African Americans." 8. "[inaudible] ... had the same reaction that they were all white people." 9.…

In January, when the United States remembered the tragic death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an urban history professor at the University of Buffalo named Henry Louis Taylor Jr., bitterly remarked: "All we know is that this guy had a dream. We don't know what that dream was." Taylor was referring to an erasure of historical memory after King's 1963 march on Washington, after he was cheered as "the moral leader of our nation." In the years before his death, King changed his focus to poverty and militarism because he thought that addressing these issues -- not solely racial brotherhood -- was crucial to making equality real. And he paid the price for this change, becoming more and more of a pariah. The danger for Sen. Barack Obama is that he is already doing to himself what later historical censorship did to King: He's cleansing his program of contentious topics in order to assure his electability. In a famous dialogue in Monty Python's religious spoof The Life of Brian, which takes place in Palestine at the time of Christ, the leader of a Jewish revolutionary resistance organization passionately argues that Romans brought only misery to the Jews. When…

At a town hall meeting in Denver in early July, a Vietnam veteran asked presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) why he had opposed increasing healthcare for veterans whenever Congress had taken up the issue over the past six years. McCain virtually ignored the man's question, dissembling his opposition to an updated GI Bill for veterans. After the questioner challenged McCain's response, the senator reacted as he usually does when queried beyond his comfort level: He got visibly angry. Because McCain is running for president almost solely on his biography as a war hero, he can't -- and won't -- allow the slightest doubt to linger about his dedication to soldiers both past and present. It didn't matter that the vet simply wanted to know how McCain -- himself a former soldier and prisoner of war -- could oppose important healthcare legislation for veterans. In fact, he didn't even ask McCain about the GI Bill that he opposed, which had been supported by a bipartisan group of 75 senators, including Republican veterans Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and John Warner (Va.). Most notably, McCain also testily responded to his inquisitor that he had "received every award from every vets organization." The problem…

When I first heard about the Democratic convention coming to my hometown of Denver, I wasn't all that excited. For many reasons, in fact, I was pretty unhappy with the whole idea. As a transplant who moved from the overpopulated East Coast to the more manageable Rocky Mountain West, I was not looking forward to huge crowds taking over what is usually a pretty quiet town. As a D.C.-hater who fled Washington's career-climbers, I was annoyed that Beltway parasites would be infesting my backyard. And as an activist who has spent a career attacking -- and trying to halt -- the influence of money on politicians, I was nauseated that a corporate-funded bonanza draped in Democratic Party bunting would take place just a few miles from my house. Now that the convention is over, I can report that all of what I feared, in fact, took place. Denver's downtown became a perpetual throng, insufferable Washington hacks from my past were unavoidable, and corporate money was so ubiquitous that even my ticket holder was emblazoned with a Qwest logo. That said, I can also report that this spectacle actually had value, beyond the free booze and celebrity sightings. Conventions, I discovered,…

It's easy to see sports today as nothing more than an escapist distraction, an uncomfortable marriage of commercialism and entertainment. But progressive journalist and rabid sports fan Dave Zirin has a different take. Sports, he shows us, can be, and always have been a stage of social conflict, too. Zirin "tackles" the notion shared by many left-wingers like author Noam Chomsky, who once observed that "sports keeps people from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about." But Chomsky, Zirin counters, fails to understand "how the very passion we invest in sports can transform it from a kind of mindless escape into a site of resistance. Sports can become an arena where the ideas of our society are not just presented but also challenged. Just as sports can reflect the dominant ideas of our society," Zirin contends, "they can also reflect struggle." Zirin's new book, A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People and Play, is a tour-de-force through the events of that struggle for social justice within the sporting arena, showcasing innumerable moments of resistance against racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism. He…

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's tepid keynote address to the Democratic convention Tuesday night was little noted and will not be long remembered. But it was important in signaling new Democratic political hopes in the South. For decades, following Richard Nixon's successful "Southern strategy" to win over white Democrats by playing on backlash to the civil rights movement, many national Democrats had written off the South -- and often with good reason, if wretched long-term consequences. But Bob Moser, author of the new book "Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority" and newly appointed editor of the muckraking Texas Observer, argues that Democrats in the rest of the country should put aside their stereotype of the South as uniquely racist and resistant to change. "Democrats saw the South as unwinnable, and Republicans viewed the South as a base," Moser told a symposium held by Progressive Democrats of America on the periphery of the Denver convention. But there are new cracks in that base, and the South itself is changing in ways that may bring breakthrough wins in the presidential race as well as in crucial Senate contests. Moser says Obama has a reasonable chance in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida,…

DENVER -- Just about everyone inside the Pepsi Center last night for Day Two of the Democratic National Convention had reason to smile. Hillary Clinton supporters saw their hero at her best: graceful and conciliatory, yet visionary and wise. Gone was the feisty (some would argue, condescending) tone that accompanied the senator from New York whenever she raised her voice against Barack Obama during their primary battle. Obama supporters breathed a sigh of relief when early in her speech, Hillary left no doubt that she was behind Barack in his bid for the White House. "I'm a proud mother, a proud senator from New York, a proud Democrat ... and a proud supporter of Barack Obama!" she said, to thunderous approval, after waiting through three minutes of applause before she could begin her speech. Democratic Party faithful clenched their fists in gleeful, testosterone-driven rage when Hillary attacked Republican presidential candidate John McCain with witty (for a politician) jabs: "No way, no how, no McCain" and "How fitting that Bush and McCain will be together in the Twin Cities next week, because these days it's hard to tell the two apart." Hillary on the offensive meant that the party could once…

CANANEA, Mexico -- Jesus Verdugo was born in this hot, dry mining town nestled in the mountains of Sonora, about 25 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. A miner like his father, he grew up on the tract of land where the open-pit mine and town converge. Cananea is home to Mexico's largest copper mine. And Verdugo, 43, is the burly, charismatic, de facto leader of the local union -- Section 65 of the Miners and Metallurgical Workers Union of Mexico (SNTMMSR). These days, his organizing entails driving his rickety, yellow pickup along winding rutted roads to check on striking copper miners who, in packs of 10 to 30, guard the various mine entrances, seven days a week. Yards away, members of a private security force (dressed in olive military garb and armed with billy clubs) lounge behind barricades of sandbags and a hurricane fence. On July 30, 2007, Verdugo and 1,300 other workers went on strike, demanding safe working conditions, healthcare and recognition of the 70-year-old union's elected leadership. Cananea's legacy At the turn of the 20th century, Col. William Green, a U.S. citizen who owned the mine, paid his Mexican employees far less than his American workers. In…

DENVER -- "This is not street theater! This is real!" shouted a man wearing a baseball cap into a microphone as approximately 20 soldiers of the United States army -- decked out in camouflaged uniforms and sporting expressions as tense as if they were invading Fallujah -- hurriedly established a checkpoint on 16th street (the pedestrian mall in downtown Denver) around noon today and scanned nearby buildings and open windows for a sniper. Steps away stood dozens of police officers, arms folded, doing nothing. Suddenly one of the soldiers announced that they were looking for a suspect wearing an orange bandana, who they suspected of planting roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs). At that the GIs began forcing nearby pedestrians face-first up against a wall and yelling at them to "shut the fuck up." One man was pinned to the ground in what looked like a stress position. The police officers, from Denver and surrounding towns, did nothing. They had been informed days before, one officer told me, that the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) were coming to town and preparing to engage in nonviolent street theater on Tuesday and Wednesday. The scared pedestrians pinned to the wall and the…

Initially, Barack Obama seemed the rare politician with the guts and vision to shred failed systems and to develop solutions that transcend quick fixes and political expediency. But as the campaign progresses, the senator is morphing into a conventional, if exceptionally charismatic, political animal. Whether his calibrated stances are evidence of savvy or traditional Democratic sell-out centrism remains to be seen. Yet neither Obama's rhetoric of hope nor John McCain's folksy belligerence will solve 21st century problems: escalating economic crises, rising food and fuel prices, global warming, the dangers of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, the vast wealth gap, crumbling infrastructures, and failed treaties and regulatory mechanisms. A sustainable future requires America to radically redefine security from winning the "war on terror" and maintaining global dominance to becoming an international partner. Sadly, while advocating negotiations, Obama still invokes outdated national security models based on military might. For example, he wants to cut troop levels in Iraq only to redeploy them to a different illegal and doomed war -- in Afghanistan. Aside from that country's centuries-honed knack for swallowing invading armies, Afghanistan offers well-armed warlords, endemic corruption, narco-trafficking and a border with Pakistan -- an unstable nuclear power whose interests conflict with…

After Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) secured his party's nomination in June, his tightly knit campaign message began to fray at the edges. Critics from across the political spectrum charge that Obama has shifted to the center or right on a host of issues, and that the flip-flopping was -- take your pick -- good, bad, inevitable or duplicitous. Progressives, whose hopes for Obama grew from his early opposition to the war in Iraq, and the youthful movement his candidacy inspired, wondered how much they could trust him on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, civil liberties, gun control, the death penalty, trade, government funding of faith-based groups and other issues. Disappointed as some progressives may be, Obama has not made a dramatic shift to the center: He's always been more centrist, cautious and compromising than many of his supporters -- and critics -- have wanted to admit. "I don't think he's changed positions," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the progressive advocacy group, Campaign for America's Future. "He's always been a cautious liberal." The Wall Street Journal took the supposed changes as Obama's admission that the conservative positions on most issues were correct, and concluded that Obama, as much as Sen. John McCain…

DENVER -- On the day before the official opening of the 45th Democratic National Convention, the "who's who" of political and media elites gathered to prepare for the glitz and glamour of the week long proceedings. They were met by hundreds of protesters critical of the Democratic platform who snarled traffic for hours. And somewhere in between, an estimated 500 conventioneers and local citizens convened at The Big Tent- the convention's activist hub -- to participate in "Live From Main Street," a town hall where progressive leaders and an energetic crowd debated the important interplay between activism and party politics. Hosted by GritTV's Laura Flanders and produced by The Media Consortium -- a network of progressive media outlets -- Live From Main Street Denver--"So You Say You Want Change? The Opportunities and Challenges Ahead"-- was the third in a series of five town hall meetings across the country in five months. In this installment, provided as a live, streaming webcast, Flanders interviewed a diverse set of progressive change-makers to discuss the nuts and bolts of harnessing electoral energy into tangible change -- and how much of it is really happening (or possible) this election cycle. In front of a packed…

In August 1968, the most wrongheaded war in American history was being executed badly and brutally in distant Southeast Asia. Yet 40 years ago this week, when the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago to nominate its standard-bearer, the world was riveted by the blood on avenues, sidewalks and parks much closer to home. The '68 Democratic National Convention debacle remains a symbol of everything that went wrong with American politics, society and culture in that tumultuous and iconic year. It was five days of mayhem in the Windy City, five days that left the Democratic Party in shambles. Outside, along Chicago's gleaming Michigan Avenue and in leafy Lincoln Park, Mayor Richard J. Daley's police department went on an officially sanctioned rampage. The cops clubbed and tear-gassed antiwar protesters and bystanders alike. Inside the Chicago Amphitheater, "Boss" Daley wrestled with other Democratic Party leaders over Hubert Humphrey, the unpopular and ultimately doomed nominee. In August 1968, those explosive battles put Chicago at the epicenter of one of the most searing political and social upheavals of the 20th century. In August 2008, a U.S. senator from Chicago will be anointed the first black major-party nominee for the presidency of the United States.…

A wave of GOP state legislators and other officials is defecting from the Republican Party, exposing the role that an increasingly hard line on social issues may be playing in driving out moderates. The departures weaken the GOP as it confronts another challenging election. "I don't think Ronald Reagan would recognize the party anymore," Wisconsin state Rep. Jeff Wood told the Chippewa Herald on July 8. Wood announced he was leaving the Republicans to become an independent. In a closely divided state -- where each of the major parties narrowly controls one chamber -- Wood's switch underscores widespread concern over conservatives' embrace of big government on issues such as war spending and eavesdropping. "The party continues to try to prove Ben Franklin wrong, trying to buy security by sacrificing liberty," Wood said. Others who are leaving the GOP in states essential to Republican electoral strategies are even announcing as Democrats. "I am not leaving the Republican Party as much as I believe the Republican Party left me," four-term Colorado state Rep. Debbie Stafford told the Associated Press. To welcome Stafford into their ranks, state Democrats recently gave her a jersey bearing the number "40." That is the number of seats…

It is painful to watch a house of cards topple. Yet, even as it's being built, we know its destruction is imminent. The collapse of our nation's housing market might have been predicted by the banking sector's overzealous expansion in homeownership and the infusion of home-equity loan dollars into an otherwise dragging economy. Once upon a time, home loans were offered at fixed rates for 30 years. People saved 20 percent of the value of a home to show credit worthiness. Mortgage payments didn't fluctuate on fixed-term loans and there was no element of gambling involved in the process. In the last decade, though, the government developed lending instruments to facilitate homeownership -- rates were fixed, rates were variable, payments were set at lower than the interest rate, with high balloon payments expected at the end of a loan. Mortgage brokers worked with borrowers with credit challenges to find loans, offering loan terms that were affordable in the short run and disasturous in the long run. This fiscal creativity was a function of home values rising so rapidly that people could count on tapping into extra cash and income from their home equity to finance automobiles, education and consumer spending.…

In June, the Supreme Court explicitly affirmed the individual's right to bear arms. The ruling -- District of Columbia v. Heller -- has broad implications, opening the possibility for further legal challenges to gun statutes across the country. Conventional wisdom identifies "gun control" as a "liberal" issue, and "gun rights" as a "conservative" one. But such stereotyped thinking not only substitutes the policy goals of elites for the opinions and experiences of everyday people (and excludes consideration of the views of people of color), it also obscures the political assumptions shared by the two so-called opposing camps. As with so much in American politics, the current debates find their origins in our history of racist inequality and violence. Truth is, there has always been gun control in America. Starting in the colonial period and continuing after the American Revolution, laws excluded specific people from gun ownership -- slaves, free blacks, Indians, poor whites, non-Protestants and even some heterodox Protestant sects. During the same period, militias -- which never performed particularly well in military engagements -- were chiefly responsible for putting down insurrections. And in the South, they were responsible for organizing slave patrols to police the black population. After the…

Matthew Hartman had every intention of enlisting in the Army directly after his graduation in two years. But it was Col. Sterling Stokes and his military staff who convinced Hartman that college, not the battlefield, was a better option. At least for now. "They persuaded me that there is always time to serve my country and that maybe I would be able to serve even better if I went to college first," Hartman, 16, says. The Richmond, Va., native is a junior at the Franklin Military Academy in Richmond, where Stokes is principal. He earned the highest score on the 2008 National Chemistry Olympiad in his school, and is the type of student college admissions counselors would like to see among their applicants. But for Cadet Hartman, the military seemed like a natural progression. Academies like Franklin Military are part of the country's rapidly expanding Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) program. The academies are exclusively JROTC and the Department of Defense helps fund them -- part of a growing trend to introduce military schools into the public school system in primarily poor urban areas where many school systems are struggling, if not failing. These academies aren't boot camps for…