These white tours of the lumpen masses end up aestheticizing poverty, and making the degradations of daily life for the working poor a sort of aesthetic petri dish. The poor, who they basically detest, are still envied. So the appropriation of their stories is like stealing the last thing they have. The point is not the suffering for such directors, but to see what is'cool' and marketable, what image might emerge from the experiment that can be reproduced as a commodity. The poor are not the subject, only their style. John Steppling, Blog.
What could be more important than George Clooney and Steve Wynn duking it out about Obama Care? The One Percent talking to the Point-One-Percent in one Mafiosi's gambling den while the Hollywood limp-brained one under the cover of tequila tries to defend OBAMA care? Right, the INSURANCE COMPANY CARE that an almost-billionaire-TV-actor is defending because he knows so well how 25 year olds and the majority of us, precarious workers, live and have been fighting for MORE taxes on his ass, on his profits and on his environmental-destructive Hollywood a la planes, trucks, endless silicone, trips to ski-Med-Island fun. This Wynn guy, again, self-proclaimed to be a "Big Jew in Vegas" (these guys are self-loathing but self-important - including Vegas's mayor Oscar Goodman and the Sheldon guy) is a bastion of what is so cool and hip and mean and felonious about US of Assets. This is what makes the news, this little bar stool spat. NEWS.
What drivel, and we will find out more and more about these losers who are winning at the bank. Really, local news peppered with this celebrity crap, and another three million stories flushed down the toilet while we learn Clooney is engaged and, wow, look at that ring on the Lebanese woman's educated at Oxford finger giving us the proverbial FINGER.
Both rotten to the core, meaningless, but the voice of America, and, the billionaire casino freak like the others named Sheldon Adelson, et al, like the Kochs and the dozens of philanthropy authorities paying for middling nothingness for all the non-profits and environmental eco-porn purveyors, well, they pay for Obama and maybe George Clooney running for, what, Terminator Six governor, and then, oh, the Clooney factory of silly foppish junk. So Wynn remade (sic) the Las Vegas Strip and revitalized (sic) Las Vegas by building new hotel casino resorts. His Mirage opened in 1989, and Treasure Island opened next door four years later. He blew up the Dunes and built Bellagio, one of the world's hotshot hotels, on the Dunes' site. It opened in 1998. He merged his company with MGM and then sold his shares.
This Loathing Las Vegas story doesn't last long, because there is another dual citizen making the news as his USA and Israli roots - again, a guy who great up on the east coast, changed his name to Sterling, ran these slum apartment operations, and made his money ripping off HUMANITY. He should be getting the ears of, oh, a few dozen political leaders in this country.
Oh, while I work with adults with developmental disabilities, whose benefits are cut-cut daily, who are in the arms of babes, shoot, they listen to the news and her yet another story from yet another piece of human warm you know what and his racist brigade? Donald "I Was Not Allowed to Join the Country Club Cuz I Was Jewish" Sterling, LA Clippers owner, saying and going crazy over what? This is news? News, that white Jewish Male Heads of Franchises Are Racists and Have Always Hated Africans or African Americans? Honorary Israeli is an Oy, gevalt stars and bars a la star of david. We get it on Democracy Now now, and we have analysis after analysis of this creep with his creepy and pathetic girlfriend who is black and his creepy basketball players who are as a whole 75% African-American, who in the end have sold themselves to the devils of finance and libertarianism but now are pissed off at Sterling's sterling behavior via a tapped voice recoroding of him telling his girlfriend to not hang out with Magic Johnson (oh, not because this fellow is a One Percenter, but because he is black?).
Franchises and media moguls and the Little Eichmann's who live off of that dirty, mob, homocidal money. TV and local yokels and political professionals and the wimpering tenured intellectuals (sic), well, we are in a fine mess, Ollie. A fine mess, Stanley.
Please go to " Black Agenda Report " and see what is happening to African-Americans, what is happening to the victims of the Once Percent, Wells Fargo, GM, GE, DoD, the entire mess that is capitalism. Read the real stories. Why is Sterling in the news? His tongue, his inbred racism? We have cops killing with inpunity and a Supreme Court killing with inpunity and a President killing with inpunity. And this is the story of the day? NBA has all these great values, and so, the idiotic tape telling his bizarre girlfriend to not bring blacks to the Clippers' games is news? Drone-America, Privatizing-America - limping, coughing, spitting up blood and we spend time on athletes and Sterling? Do we maybe question, David Zirin, the culture of the rich in anything they do? Or how sports and cities and gentrificaion and the legal prostitution rings - i.e. lawyers - are killing things that are the backbone to America's draining middle class and recarious youth.
"What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn't just his racism. I'm bothered that everyone acts as if it's a huge surprise. Now there's all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That's the smoking gun?
He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn't want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn't we have all called for his resignation back then?
Shouldn't we be equally angered by the fact that his private, intimate conversation was taped and then leaked to the media? Didn't we just call to task the NSA for intruding into American citizen's privacy in such an un-American way? Although the impact is similar to Mitt Romney's comments that were secretly taped, the difference is that Romney was giving a public speech. The making and release of this tape is so sleazy that just listening to it makes me feel like an accomplice to the crime. We didn't steal the cake but we're all gorging ourselves on it."
What makes Abdul-Jabbar's statement even keenier is, the girlfriend's role - He wants
us all to be outraged that Stiviano will benefit financially from this "act of betrayal," writing that she "will probably get a book deal, a sitcom, trade recipes with Hoda and Kathie Lee, and soon appear on Celebrity Apprentice and Dancing with the Stars."
THE NEWS is about the 80 Percent - No Jobs, No Protections, No More EDUCATION!
It's really tough to get anyone's attention around precarious work conditions, around the supremely at-will nature of American society. When confronted with Cat Stuck in a Dryer news and the latest poor American methed up and drunk and on the front page of these white men's TV stations?
What was that again? A smaller and smaller minority controlling food, culture, medicine, economy, the works. Eastern educated, or sun-drenched, Zionists, exhibitionists for capital, the laughers, and the criers. All there ready to tell you and tell me how to write, think, educate, and plow through our responsibilities as citizens. They are thugs, like those on both sides of the drug dealing shown in el Narco Cultura about sadists killing innocents and fellow drug runners while a bunch of new immigrants a la hyphenated Mexican-Americans make big bucks writing and singing songs about decapitating bodies and raping women and stuffing hundred dollar bills up their bums. Another documentary, sort of okay, but limp in the end because the drug sadists are there because of USA policy, USA puritanical shit around drugs and drug abuse and the president(s) of Mexico tethered to USA-CIA-DEA, working that homicidal magic. A film about the pukes making music for thugs and having all these nice family folk drinking it up in LA, San Antonio, Seattle, Atlanta, dancing and singing the raping and machete-ripping and semi-automatic rythms of the drug dealers, rapists and mutilators. These new Americans are like the old Americans - making money off of the One Percent Capitalist values (sic). A film about the shit lyrics pumping up these lunatics, this rapid fire mutilators and child rapists and drug thugs, while the Criminologists in Juarez work to catalogue each and every charred, decapitated, bloated body left in the desert or strapped in their torched cars. That is the contrast the film shows - drug lords and their sychophants and "artists" against the backdrop of CSI guys and gals picking up the bones and flesh of 10,000 murdered people in Juarez, my old town, my old incubator of my early journalistic roots and fiction grooming.
We are failed, without a landscape of constant illumination of the rot of the society propped up by prison-military-financial-energy-agra-pharma-tainment complexe that is the new narrative and normal. These criminologists are body piece collectors, trained, caring, and they are targeted by the heroes of this new entertainment biz. They have to wear masks to do their jobs picking up rotting and dog-picked-over bodies in poor neighborhoods. And, with their high-tech tools and one of the biggest CSI facility in the world, almost all of their evidence is flushed away in the political toilet that is Mexican capitalism and democracy.
Wal-mart won't carry Marilyn Manson CDs, but . . . narcocorrido music, gangster rap, which is in places in Mexico have folkds trying to ban the genre (making it more popular) American Wal-Marts carry narcocorrido CDs, despite that thug of a corporation banning music by acts it deems offensive.
Watch it, and this shows you how screwed up Americans are, those making a buck off of that much pain. Or the ones who write TV series like, well, FILL in the blank. All of them are sadomasochistic. This bizarre series called The Fall with that strange actress from X-Files playing an inspector in Ireland trying to solve the mutliations and rapes and murders of young women by the white male trash (and he is labeled Jewish in the series) who is married and has kids and who gets all the points of view from the writers and cinematographers and directors. It's mutilating fiction, mutilating American psycho crap, and that Gillian Anderson gives humanity nothing but sickness, and she gets paid for this shit, and she ends up on talk shows and interview shows, taken seriously, and yet, her character and her acting are sick-sick.
"Going to a club and hearing this music is more of a way for Mexican-American kids who come from good homes to find a way to identify themselves, to go to a night club and feel what it means to be a narco for a night," he said. "Guys become narcos to get out of poverty, and the [Mexican] government doesn't help the situation. The narcos build schools and roads, they help their towns where they are from. They feel they have to help locally," said Shaul Schwarz, producer-director-creative energy of the film.
The power of the cartels in his film, in this predominantly Catholic country?
"Even for the church, people are scared," Schwarz said. "Only a mother screams in grief [in the film], which is a no-no in Juarez. Intimidation and fear of the cartels is huge - and for the right reasons. The church is not different from this. At the end of the day, the church fails like everyone else."
How Many Times Have I Argued with the Elite, White/Male/WASP/Jew?
So, talking about adjuncts or education, while listening to the pukes of IT and AI going on and on how we have to have kids on tablets by 6 years of age, that all kids have to learn how to code, that all teaching must be done by robot or singing, glowing iPad, well, this is the state we are in, and there is something stinking in the wind. Those who are in power - white males, white females, white, well, think of minority power out there.
Here, interesting, this Gold Medal for this racist Jew dictating American education values at the very top. Thanks to Alison Weir's article, "The Extremist Origins of Education and Sharing Day."
"Why is the US Honoring a Racist Rabbi?" Weir, according to her bio-blub at Counterpunch, is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. Her book, Against Our Better Judgment: How the U.S. was used to create Israel, contains additional information on Rabbi Kook's family connection to American front groups for Israeli terrorists. (Kook was unusual in his support for political Zionism; most Jewish religious leaders at the time considered the movement heretical).
If things proceed normally, President Barak Obama will soon proclaim April 11, 2014 "Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A." Despite the innocuous name, this day honors the memory of a religious leader whose lesser-known teachings help fuel some of the most violent attacks against Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers and soldiers.
The leader being honored on this day is Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, charismatic head of a mystical/fundamentalist version of Judaism. Every year since 1978, a Presidential Proclamation, often accompanied by a Congressional Resolution (the 1990 one had 219 sponsors), has declared Schneerson's birthday an official national day of observance.
Congress first passed a Resolution honoring Schneerson in 1975. Three years later a Joint Congressional Resolution called on President Jimmy Carter to proclaim "Education Day, U.S.A." on the anniversary of Schneerson's birth. The idea was to set aside a day to honor both education and the alleged educational work of Schneerson and the religious sect he headed up.
Carter, like Congress, dutifully obeyed the Schneerson-initiated resolution, as has every president since. And some individual states are now enacting their own observances of Schneerson's birthday, with Minnesota and Alabama leading the way.
Schneerson and his movement are an extremely mixed bag.
Schneerson has been praised widely for a public persona and organization that emphasized "deep compassion and insight," worked to bring many secular Jews "back" into the fold, created numerous schools around the world, and had offered, in the words of the Jewish Virtual Library, "social-service programs and humanitarian aid to all people, regardless of religious affiliation or background."
However, there is also a less attractive underside often at odds with such public perceptions. And some of the more extreme parts of Schneerson's teachings - such as that Jews are a completely different species than non-Jews, and that non-Jews exist only to serve Jews - have been largely hidden, it appears, even from many who consider themselves his followers.
So how do we even have conversations about Part-Time Nation, Part-Time Higher Education, when the hand-basket is already in hell melting?
This is a country in collective hysteria when it comes to the junk of TV and Boston Marathon Bombing and Anything Israel Deems Dangerous collective hysteria, our collective annihilation. What is this Jewish Zionist Rabbi saying about me, a non-Jew, secular but sure, why not, pantheist in some mophed bent? Again, Weir, and how much of my tax money is going to this Schneerson and his whack job religion and society?
Some of Schneerson's rarely reported teachings:
- "The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: 'Let us differentiate.' Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of 'let us differentiate" between totally different species.'"
- "This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world ... The difference in the inner quality between Jews and non-Jews is 'so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species.'"
- "An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness."
- "As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood."
- "...the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews."
- "The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim."
- "The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews."
Culture as Bad TV, A lot of Bad TV, and Bad Cable, and Bad Smart Phone Culture!
In any case, I am confronted daily with a triangulation of people in power with shits for vision but money running through their arteries, carrying out a slash and burn on almost anything valued in society, anything that might get us past this suicide of body, mind, mother earth and brain. Here, John Steppling, commenting on the issues tied to our mainstream aesthetics, and the American state of mind:
I think my point is that art and aesthetics are complex matters and they exist in real time. One the one hand, corporate produced cultural product is 99% reactionary, and 99% kitsch and is almost always reproducing the familiar, and all of it in service of reproducing ruling class values. But there is stuff, worth examining, because it, in different ways, reveals a good deal about the society we live in, and more, about the mediated sub conscious of the American psyche. Or at least a good chunk of it. And there are contradictions, and one of them is to see the ever (seemingly) increasing white tours of the underclass. From Out of the Furnace, to Bad Company, to The Place Beyond the Pines, to Killing Me Softly, you have youngish white directors, from privileged backgrounds, touring the "authenticity" of the underclass. Usually with white male movie stars in the lead.
We are a directed society, held in the scope of a few, these pieces of corporate welfare, the pimps and prostitutes of the board rooms, the felons of our future. Steppling's work points to our crappy culture, TV, all conduits to the National Jewish-Zionist-Propaganda Radio, Propaganda Broadcasting System and the rest of the corralling stuff that has turned Americans in intellectual and journalistic wimps.
Then we have the violence porn of films like " Saw". This is just degraded material on all levels, and one wonders at who makes this stuff? It is linked to the malformed sexuality of patriarchal white America, and it serves as (take your pick) an outlet for would be rapists, or training material for would-be rapists. But it is wildly misogynist and almost always, as an added bonus, politically reactionary. For in all this material, the status quo is reinforced. Then you have the 'disposable populace' cop franchises. This is the Bochco and Milch realm, and Dick Wolff and all of it is strikingly authoritarian. This was that turn that began with Dragnet in the 50s, where film noir became Jack Webb - the protagonists were not Knights Errant any longer, but clerks of the state, the jack boot anal retentive Webb served to usher in the era of "exploring the inner lives of the police." From Chandler and Hammett and Cain to Law & Order and Hill Street Blues. These are the franchises in which certain models are put in place; black inner cities are criminal wastelands full of hoody wearing gangbangers, or Latino drug dealers, or even Vietnamese human traffickers. This is the world view of White men, it swings between mock liberal and trenchant open racist fascism. From " 24″ to the new Chicago PD, another Wolff project, that squarely hits at all the same buttons that he's hit for twenty years. White masculinity projects. There has been such a staggering number of these shows that the audience is now watching as if watching an enshrined myth being played out. There are no surprises, only the reassuring replay of the same racist reactionary tropes they already know. And these shows depict a lot of violence. Usually "bad guys" (often poor, black and Latino) do bad things and "good guys" (cops) do good things. The violence is often graphic, but not always. But then we arrive at the new prestige violence. Hannibal, and Game of Thrones. In each, there are curious elements at work. But in both, in different ways, violence is the subject.
So how do I get out of this giant yawn, that education is a joke, that kids need Tablets and Servers to God to Learn how to be Compliant and Capitalist Cured, like Bacon Grease on Cast Iron? Really, I am in the mix, teaching K12, college, adults with developmental disabilities and working around the edges now on higher educaiton's role in collapsing democracy and killing adjuncts.
There are so many battles now for adjunct faculty, from New York to Seattle, and New Mexico, California, Colorado. In the end, it's a titular battle, fought on the digital waves of wavering and wallowing willingness to engage in rather hand-cuffed dialogues. Look at this stupid workshop, American Federation of Teachers. I went to one of these part-time faculty conferences three years ago. What a fucking waste of time. The same pathetic people not roaring up and spitting in the faces of the VPs, Deanlets, and admin, class.
This is 2014 and this National Union Does This?
Unemployment Workshop presented by Marc Lampson, Executive Director & John Tirpak, Senior Hearings Attorney, Unemployment Law Project and Wendy Rader-Konofalski, Lobbyist, Washington Education Association.
- Learn how to apply for unemployment benefits and the main reason claims are denied.
- What is "reasonable assurance"?
- Discover the context and history of our unemployment law and why it is unique.
Presentation about Working Together To Make Our Union Strongerwith discussions by Alyssa Picard, Assistant Director, AFT Higher Education and a Special Guest from City College of San Francisco Faculty Union.
Hear successes and challenges of AFT contingent faculty members from across the nation.
Find out how one local gained some of the strongest pay equity in the country among both part-time and full-time faculty.
Next Step: Developing a plan for your local.
How to get unemployment? What uninspring crap. No workshops on how to monkey-wrench the entire system, how to fight back, how to get into the streets, how to get students and parents to rebel the student loan Bubble about to burst thanks to administrators, honchos, the business class, casino White Male-Female Capitalism. No workshops on how to organize outside the old, moldy unions, run by White Male of Priviledge Class? We need to train people to NOT be trained, to fight, and to rebel and to cheat the cheating systems in place, described above. The enemy is the Little Eichmann in private industry and public service and the politicians.
Then this schizoid letter from a dean hired by my former school, and, what crap these borgoise faculty-deans are loading up the academic world. They are the problem, now are they not? She's an interum dean, against her will, because the school can't carry out searches properly, or they get a final list of candidates and then deem them unworthy. This is academe at its best (Sic). Note the stupidity of this dean's remarks, and then compare them to the president's, the guy running the same institution.
Good Wednesday evening!
How is your third week of the quarter going? Hopefully well! We are on the home stretch of this academic year!
Instructional Council (IC) did not meet last week which was good since I was out of town! But we did meet this morning and discussed several things.
1) Credit for Prior Learning - it's coming. This will enable students (and faculty and staff if you so choose) to ask for evaluation of prior learning. There will be more information coming out about this but I wanted to give you a heads up.
2) The College website - The website is not getting just a new "face-lift." It is being created from the ground floor with an anticipated launch date sometime in August. Communications & Marketing will be working with each area on campus to make sure that their pages and content are accurate and a good representation of that area. The Unit Leadership Team (division chairs, etc) will be meeting with the primary developer in early May so we may be coming back for feedback from you after that meeting.
3) Budget - Oh so many numbers. Basically, the College is still looking at $3,200,000 in cuts. But EC (Executive Cabinet) has identified multiple sources to off-set that a bit. In the end, this week (yes, this week as it seems to be that the numbers are very fluid), Instruction's share of the cut is still approximately $1,450,000. Various areas of Goods & Services, Equipment, Repairs, etc have been identified. Travel budgets college-wide will be cut 50%. There will be little to none release time granted other than what is contractually mandated. A reduction in adjunct medical benefit allocation will occur. And finally, yes positions will be reduced college-wide. How will that shake out for our unit? I honestly do not know the specifics yet. I do believe that the FT Temp positions that were secured for CMST and ENGL will be cut for the next year. These are 2 of the 3 FT Temp positions (out of a total of 5 college-wide) the BEECH unit secured in January. This isn't news I want to deliver nor is there ever a good time, but I will not string you along.
That all being said, you will see a few internal job postings in the basic education English Communications Humanities Unit. I'm working on some pretty major changes in the structure of our staffing. Please know that NONE of these positions posted are "new." They are positions that are being created / reallocated from vacant positions to create salary savings. For example, we have a vacant Secretary Senior position from Basic Education. There were 2 Secretary Senior positions total. Instead of filling that vacant position with another Secretary Senior for Basic Ed, we will be converting our 1050 office assistant positions in Basic Education and English (those currently held by PS and DW) into 75% permanent office assistants. This is a positive move for our Unit. In addition, we will not be rehiring a Director of Basic Education. However, a new structure in the Basic Education area is currently being discussed, and I'll have more details about that a bit later in May. All that say, changes are happening and positions will be posted. But please do not consider these new positions. In most of the decisions regarding the staffing changes and structure, we are creating a bit of salary savings.
Do you see this? This neutering? This dean making $80K a year, with tenure and balloon retirement, just corralling the masses? They are the handmaids of the devils.
Now, this one from the totally wrong-headed, cloistered, military-minded president of the institution. Get this, ex-military, and, well, you think he has any idea how to live as an adjunct, the majority of faculty in "his" school. This is a putz who is selling roof space to a cell phone company to put up their antennae on the student services building. These people are worthless, and cutting salaries, cutting hours, cutting full-time jobs, and screwing students and adjunct faculty is their game. Look at how screwed up their thinking is, their heiarchical crap, their systems, their sense of how to destroy collective thought and purpose.
College community,
Although CCollege remains one of the most over-enrolled colleges in the state, our student numbers have been declining for the last two years. The impact of this trend on our budget is significant. Because we are now more dependent on student tuition than state support, every drop in enrollment reduces the amount of revenue we take in. It is against that backdrop that I want to share with you our plans for developing the College's 2014-15 budget.
Revenue DeficitBased on projections of serving 7,830 state FTES next year (about 400 fewer than in 2013-14) and 1,450 Running Start FTES (about the same), initial estimates from our Budget Office indicate we are looking at a revenue shortfall of more than $2.6 million. Although it's possible that Running Start reimbursement rates may go up in 2014-15, the state legislature has already ruled out a tuition increase. This leaves the College with few prospects for closing the gap with additional revenue. Therefore, as a first step to address the shortfall, we will carry over the 1.4% across-the-board reductions - totaling $819,129 - from the current year budget into 2014-15. This will bring the projected deficit down to around $1.8 million.
Budget Development ProcessAs part of the Shared Governance model adopted in 2010, the College created a Budget and Finance Advisory Committee comprised of representatives from across the institution. One of the responsibilities of this committee is to recommend to Executive Cabinet a process for developing the College's annual budget. In February, Cabinet approved the committee's proposal to use a new Rubric to asses all functions and services. For Instruction, the Rubric will be used only for its administrative functions. Direct instructional programs will be assessed through a different process conducted within Instruction.
The goal of the Rubric is to help the College evaluate functions and services according to how well they support the Strategic Plan and our core commitment to student retention and success. The new Rubric allows us to sort out functions and services that are either mandatory or self-support and then direct our focus on those areas of the College where we have the most flexibility to make adjustments. The Rubric, though, is only an instrument for organizing our decision making; the decisions themselves will be reached through a shared governance process guided by the Budget Values, Principles and Guidelines we adopted in 2009.
The entire budget development process as recommended by the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee can be found on CollegeNet The key steps in the process include the following:
Each Executive Cabinet member will engage their teams in using the Rubric to assess the functions and services in their area.
EC members will present their results to the full Executive Cabinet. Cabinet members will have the opportunity to question each other about their results.
EC's preliminary results will be compiled into a single report and posted under the Budget tab on CNet.
The college community will be invited to review these results and submit feedback directly to their College Council representative.
College Council will present feedback provided by their constituents.
This feedback will be shared with Executive Cabinet. After consideration of this feedback, EC will make preliminary budget decisions.
Consistent with its charter, the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee will provide feedback on these decisions.
This feedback will be shared with Executive Cabinet. Final decisions will be communicated by me in a college-wide message, which will include a description on how your feedback factored into the decision making.
Final authority for approval of the budget rests with the Board of Trustees.
Executive Cabinet is just beginning the Rubric process. Feedback from College Council and the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee will be gathered in April. Decisions will be announced in May.
Moving ForwardAny budget development process that involves the prospect of reductions creates uncertainty and anxiety. This is not the future any of us envision for CCollege. That's why we are working on a long term student enrollment and retention plan to help us strategically manage how we recruit, retain and enroll students. We are also working very actively on a statewide task force charged with reviewing how the state allocates FTES and funding to the 34 colleges in the system. I believe these efforts will help stabilize, if not improve, our budget in the near future. For now, I am asking that all of us continue to work together to serve students during a time when we face difficult budget decisions.
Thank you. Your President!
Double-Speak Equals Murder
I bored you with just two of, oh, dozens of emails I get daily and received daily in Spokane, about the state of the campus, about us, the Majority, not getting shit, about loss of classes, loss of entire quarters and semesters, and we are supposed to shut up and agree? I received my ten-year pin (which I refused along with the pen set and other crap because they had blood of Chinese sweat shop all over them) and then, well, these Christian Deans run in many cases by their Jewish Provosts tell me I am too much in the news, too many times writing columns and broadcasting radio shows criticizing the school and naming names. Oh, sure, one too many students complaints (make that about 5 in 10 years, and that is a tidal wave to these Little Eichmanns). These leaders with PhDs are spineless, so do not expect spineless folk to go toe-to-toe with the cleaned-up versions of Donald Sterling a la academe to do much. They are shadow people, stuck in their towers, silos, and, they will NEVER walk the talk, and they are culturally co-opted by Bezos-MOOCs-Gates-Apple-Anything-On-line.
Note the double-speak, the soulless banter, the systems speak, the ideology, the covering of his ass writing skills learned as a commissioned officer, retired, of the US military. Note the cabal thinking, and the lack of creativity, and the bloodless cold junk thinking. Note that these people hire other people like them to create meaningless "rubrics" and commitee after committee, to make it appear there is colusion and cooperation, when in fact presidents and their dean-lets and VPs and provosts and admin. staff are in the game for money, for prestige and to see teaching moved quickly to tablets and the glowing screens of the future.
While working here for a brief time (that's another blog why I am NOT still teaching there) I noticed no one calling this military guy out (a president of a community college with 20-plus years under his belt as military felon) to his face. Lots of petty grumbling behind his backs. Tenured faculty reeping what they can, praying the state retirement system doesn't go the way of Enron and Houston teachers' retirement system. They are neutered, faculty, and they live lives that are shadows of humanity.
They have boughten into lock-step: follow the common core curriculum, follow rubrics and common grading and common teaching material mentality. They have more and more adjunct faculty in their midst, so they demand more and more standardization of teaching anything, you name it - math, philosophy, history, biology, composition, literature. Learn Outcomes. Data collecting. The new god of on-line blended courses, or full-steam ahead with fully on-line poetry to physics. These people, a majority of the faculty, are the problem, NOT the solution.
One Hip Surgery Away from Total Control
Faculty are tattered and cannot speak the speak of institutional management, can't go up against the rule makers, can't put holes in a college system that produces followers, produces rule followers/makers/schemers and generate waves of fearful youth who have no sense that revolution is inside, and that faculty -adults, mentors, supposed leaders in thinking - will lead them to new ways of thinking.
This is why we have leaders in the Earth Day movement, even here at DV, who see a company like Apple a leader in earth day green porn. That the company - that APPLE sweatshop, producer of junk, producer of things that replace human jobs and agency, junk, really, and death of jobs - is somehow the greenest on planet earth for getting energy from hydro power and solar panels? Toyota leading the New York Earth Day celebration? So, even the few students who come out of K12 and higher ed with a bit of a left bent, they too are capitalists' tools, all hip and smart and believing their white dominion, the great white man-woman's burden. These people have been cultured to not revolt, to be and play nice, to stay within the coloring book lines. You never know when the medical and insurance Narcos will come into your lives draining all those savings and helping the ex-military college presidents giving you the BOOT.
So who is in control? And what does that mean that whites are in cabals, that we have Clooney and Wynn and Sterling making the news? That Kock and Kroc, Pew and Carnegie, that the entire Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs are taking us into a world of military-drone-Hi-Tech madness, and we sit back and play with the giga-bytes they loan us. Who rules the Supreme Court, Wall Street, Industries? Black Agenda Report: Glen Ford -
"Majoritarian rule becomes a crude legal redoubt of white supremacy."
White majorities have the constitutional right to create laws that selectively lock racial minorities into inferior status. So decreed the United States Supreme Court, in a 6 to 2 vote upholding Michigan's prohibition against affirmative action in public higher education. Although race-conscious admissions polices remain legally permissible, voters may close the door to such remedies to historical discrimination, at will, as set forth in Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's controlling opinion: "There is no authority in the Constitution of the United States or in this court's precedents for the judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit this policy determination to the voters."
In plain English, Black folks have no rights that white majorities are bound to respect.
It's "a racist decision," the modern equivalent to the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v Ferguson ruling sanctifying racial segregation, said Shanta Driver , lawyer for Detroit-based By Any Means Necessary, the losing party in the case. The decision "makes clear that this Court intends to do nothing to defend the right to equality in politics, opportunity, rights, hopes and aspirations of its Latina/o, black, Native American and other minority citizens" said Driver. "At the very moment that America is becoming a majority minority nation this Court is declaring its intention to uphold white privilege and to create a new Jim Crow legal system."
The circling of black robes around the inviolability of the principle of one person-one vote is a supreme historical irony, given that the Constitution originally counted Black slaves as " three-fifths of all other Persons" for the purpose of apportioning the Congress. White majorities were slim or non-existent in the slave-intensive states, whose reconstruction to electoral "democracy" remains incomplete to the present. Yet, in the waning days of a national white majority, an era projected to end around the year 2043 , majoritarian rule becomes a crude legal redoubt of white supremacy.
"This Court intends to do nothing to defend the right to equality."
Back in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action at the University of Michigan served a compelling public interest in spreading "diversity" in the upper echelons of U.S. society. As I wrote in The Black Commentator at the time, the Court was not addressing Black historical grievances, which had already gone by the legal wayside. Rather, it ruled that the programmatic inclusion of non-whites at elite public universities created benefits for society as a whole. This week's ruling sweepingly proclaims the right of white majorities (58 percent of "the voters" in a 2006 Michigan referendum) to forgo such benefits, at their pleasure, as have California, Florida, Texas, and Washington.
Affirmative action, as understood by President Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is long dead . It is "diversity" as public policy that was mortally wounded by the Roberts court, this week. Diversity is now an option that can be outlawed by white voter fiat - which will no doubt occur at a quickening pace given that majorities of whites believe they are the main objects of discrimination in American life. A 2011 study by researchers at Harvard and Tufts Universities, titled "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing," showed whites "believe that anti-white bias is more prevalent than anti-Black bias" and that "Black progress is linked to a new inequality" - at white expense.
It is difficult to imagine a greater mass cognitive dissonance. The racism that has always been endemic to the U.S. drove whites crazy, and majorities of them remain nuts - dangerous people, capable of...anything. The High Court has given its benediction to the righteousness of their insanity.
"Diversity is now an option that can be outlawed by white voter fiat."
The judicial system is, of course, even more consistent in building a body of legal precedent for the supremacy of money in electoral politics, than of the primacy of majorities - the two being antithetical in principle. In practice, however, the U.S. Supreme Court knows how to serve both majorities of whites and Big Capital, too. The post-Civil War Supreme Court elevated corporations to personhood, smoothing the way for the Gilded Age, and plunged Blacks into the depths of Constitutionally-sanctioned Jim Crow, simultaneously creating all-white electorates and one-party rule by the most backward elements of the bourgeoisie in Dixie.
In Michigan, where white majority opinions and prejudices are deemed sacred by the High Court and a racist referendum is dubbed a " Civil Rights Initiative ," more than half of Black voters have been effectively disenfranchised under the dictatorship of state-imposed emergency financial managers. In jurisdictions like Detroit, Flint and Benton Harbor, where Blacks are the bulk of the population, majorities mean less than nothing; they are dangerous, and must be politically neutered for the general public good, while Wall Street picks Detroit's bones in a federal bankruptcy court.
Where racism is endemic, all kinds of things are possible - and constitutional.
Paul K. Haeder lived one-year in Seattle working for "the" SEIU (Service Employees International Union), the largest private sector union in the USA (in their pro-Obama PR materials), to organize adjuncts in Bezos-Boeing-Gates land, after having worked as a communications, language, composition, writing instructor of the freeway flyer variety in El Paso for the University of Texas, the El Paso Community College, language institutes, Park College, the US Army, La Tuna Federal Correctional Institute, Packard Electric in Juarez, New Mexico State University, and several cities in Mexico. In Washington State, he taught at Gonzaga University, Spokane Community College, Spokane Falls Community College. He's job hunting -- at that golden age of 56 (and counting down) ... just what the progressive-left-of-center non-profits in the Vancouver-Portland "area" want (NOT). He can be reached at: paul@dissidentvoice.org. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.
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