Charles Hayes: Ideological amplification in politics is analogous to conflict-ridden emotion on steroids: the only purpose served is to move each side further and further apart.
The Role of the Middle-Class Revisited
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Rudy Acuña: Today the rights of Mexican Americans and immigrants are being blatantly violated by state and local officials in Arizona. Where are the voices of middle-class Latinos? Where is the fight back?
Politics: It’s About Identity, Stupid
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Charles Hayes: Elections are won and lost through appeals to identity. It’s that simple and that complicated. This is why symbols and 30-second, hot-button commercials sway public opinion.
Feeding Off Latino Misery
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Rudy Acuña: As a group Latino politicos have not been especially progressive. Indeed, they have been less than courageous when it comes to police brutality and capital punishment.
Worse Off Today Than in the Sixties: Who Gives a Damn?
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Rodolfo Acuna: The major reason for the lack of progress of Mexican American and other minorities is society’s historical amnesia or more aptly its Alzheimer disorder that erases the memory of previous efforts or commitments to bridge the gap between black, brown and white – rich and poor.
Violence Goes to College
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Vijay Prashad: The priorities of the campus are clear. An Assistant Professor earns an annual salary in the low $60,000 range; a Lieutenant in the campus safety department (the man who fired the pepper gas, for instance) brings home $110,000.
Why California State University Faculty Will Strike on November 17
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Lillian Taiz: Tomorrow—November 17th—the faculty of this great university system will take the historic step of striking on two campuses—Cal State East Bay and Dominguez Hills.
One Week in Polite and Egalitarian Japan
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Steve Hochstadt: If the US enters a long period of stagnation, our stark social inequalities may become less tolerable, as both the rise of the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations already show. More egalitarian Japanese society may be better placed to deal with lack of growth.
Occupy Wall Street Heralds a Global Counterculture
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Mark Naison: The longer I stayed at Liberty Plaza, the more it felt like the countercultural communities of the 1960s, where discontent with war and a corrupt social system had bred a communal spirit marked by incredible generosity and openness to strangers.
Teenaged Nightmare: Violent Masculinity and Young Women of Color
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Anti-feminist messages that a girl or woman is “nothing” without a man still pervade mainstream American culture with particularly insidious effect on teen girls of color.
Trivializing Rape: Zombie Feminism and Prudish SlutWalkers
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Wendy McElroy: The raw politics and hypocrisy surrounding SlutWalk expose mainstream feminism as an exhausted movement that continues to have influence only because it has been institutionalized into laws and academia.
The Deficit Committee Is a Stacked Deck
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Carl Bloice: Obviously, there is nothing demographically representative of the Gang of 12. It’s hardly democratic; but then, there is nothing particularly democratic about the whole setup.
The Place Where Family Happens
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Steve Hochstadt: Family is not just a sum of people. It’s a continuing chemical reaction among all the molecules, each person evolving through life by observing, copying, listening to, and sometimes even avoiding the others. In this family these reactions are multiplied and stimulated by the crucible of this place.
Microaggressions and Stereotype Threat
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Jessie Daniels: Our prevailing mythology of meritocracy in the U.S. tells us that education is a path to achievement. To do provide that, we expect schools to be free from racism and provide an equal education to all.
Immigration Reform Is Overdue
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Ian Goldin: In Arizona and elsewhere the smouldering debate over migration policy has generated more heat than light, risking progress on the stuttering but overdue reform agenda.
The Labor Movement Shall Not Be Erased From History
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Bill Londrigan: Working mostly behind the scenes in academic, political, and media circles for the past 40-plus years, corporations and the wealthy elite have funded a multipronged strategy to wipe out the history of the integral role played by the American labor movement in the founding and growth of our nation.
The Limits to Growth and the Growth of Despair
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Nicholas C. Arguimbau: Economic growth is bad for the economy. Or more acccurately stated, it is bad for individuals, good for the managers of large corporate and govenmental institutions and large NGOs.
The Death of Public Service
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Steve Hochstadt: Republican governors across the country argue that teachers and police and all the other employees of local and state governments make much too much money.
Race and Racism Online: What the Research Tells Us
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Jessie Daniels: Assumptions about the whiteness embedded in the infrastructure and design gets spoken when there are ruptures in that sameness, such as the introduction of an African-American-themed web browser, Blackbird.
Time for the CSU’s Top Brass to Look in the Mirror
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Lillian Taiz: We think the CSU’s top managers should get their priorities straight. We don’t have spare dollars for pet projects and unnecessary perks. They must demonstrate that they will spend every taxpayer dollar on providing students with a quality education.
State of the Union Address 2011 – Full Video and Transcript
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You can watch President Obama’s State of the Union Address, in its entirety and read the full transcript here. The president began by introducing the Speaker of the House, John Boehner. He then went on to talk about the tragedy in Tucson, pointing out that Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ seat was empty. The hour long video offers insight into what we’re to expect in the coming year.
Frat Boys and Navy Officers
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Walter Brasch: When the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot two weeks ago published on its internet page three videos made four years ago by the executive officer of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, it unleashed a firestorm that would sink the career of a decorated officer.
Cal State University Faculty Statement on “Fees” Vs. “Tuition”
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Lilian Taiz: It is tragic for all of us to have university leaders who think it’s good enough to follow the path of least resistance. In the change from fees to “tuition,” CSU leaders send a defeatist message that, oh well, there’s no money, too bad, we’ll let elected leaders off the hook and manage by shifting the cost to the students and their families.
An Early Post-Mortem: A National Day of Pouring?
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Bob Letcher: Regardless of who “wins” and who “loses” next Tuesday’s election, can there be any doubt that the results will end the country’s slow downward slide… and send it plunging headlong toward disaster of the sort and scale that the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, must have foreseen when he admonished the citizenry, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Rule of Empires: Who Built & Endured Them, and Why They Fail — Review
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Jim Cullen: Parsons’s most important contribution to a discourse of empire: his attention to the issue of assimilation-which runs between conquering and subjecting.
Education is THE Economic Issue of Our Time
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Bob Letcher: In the few weeks since President Obama so emphatically linked his education program to his effort to revive the US political economy, the President has not been pressed to detail either the substance of his education program or his procedure for winning support from a public that is increasingly cynical, skeptical, frightened, and angry.
Why Johnny Can’t Think Critically
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Rev. Irene Monroe: A mind is a terribly thing to waste. But for conservatives and Tea Party activists who want to indoctrinate our kids rather than to educate them, a mind is a terrible thing to have. Now with far-right activists like Glen Beck pushing for more Jesus and less Darwin — working to reshape the academic landscape in schools, colleges and universities across the country — we will soon know without having to wonder “Why Johnny Can’t Think Critically.”
A Modest Proposal for Financing Higher Education in California
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John MacMurray: The brilliantly simple/simply brilliant solution: re-designate our Cal State and University of California campuses as prisons. Since a goodly number of the current student population regards them as such anyway, it should not be too big a stretch.
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